Book sense.

Matej Kren: Introspective

Bratislava City Gallery

Bratislava, Slovak Republic

November 26, 2008-March 8, 2009

Magazines, newspapers, and especially books supply Matej Kren, a Slovak artist who lives in Prague, with a steady source of raw materials. All live of his installations, under the banner "Introspective" at the City Gallery of Bratislava, reconstruct and translate these everyday "word warehouses." Curated by the museum's director, Ivan Janear, the exhibition reframes Kren's signature pursuit of the transformative and illusory capacity of memories, documents, and experiences a pursuit that includes work in film, photography, sound, and installation. Four of the installations are new works created for the exhibition.

Among these installations, "Scanner" (2008) dominates, quietly consuming human sensation. A passage just large enough for one person punctuates a monumental curved wall of tens of thousands of books stacked from floor to ceiling. The book-linked path leads to a crypt, an interior room, that slowly glows and then fades to dark. As one approaches the chamber, a visceral sense of uncertainty overwhelms. The walkway leads to a square meter in the middle of the vault, and mirrors on the floor and ceiling reflect an endless succession of spaces above and below. Without possessing even a shred of acrophobia, this illusion generates insecurity and dread. The bindings of the books that line the crypt are coated with phosphorescent paint and glow an eerie, milky green as the light fades. The radiance in the dark is a moment of respite. Fear subsides. Kren's sobering examination of the interaction between knowledge and sensation dissolves all-too-popular Cartesian divides between mind and body. We seek to quickly and successfully adjust to his fictive environment. In the space or time when problem-solving balances motor response, "Scanner" is at its best: neither a sensational trick nor an intellectualized allegory.

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Kren's four other installations did not require such demanding control of discrete, fabricated spaces. "Cone" (2004), a trompe l'oeil exercise featuring a conical infinity of books, was essentially a deftly painted version of "Scanner." "History of Art (Second edition)" (2008) comprises twelve glass cubes each about eleven inches square that rest on black pedestals in a darkened room, evenly spaced in a straight line. Within each pedestal a light radiates upward through the glass, and encased in each cube is residue of one of twelve volumes from a series of art history texts. As the cubes were cast, molten glass consumed each volume and fixed it within hardened glass as residual carbon, ash, and other ignited fragments. The darkened gallery and the softly illuminated cubes reify this generous inventory of historical and textural transformations.

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An older work from 1995. "The Virtual Stone Garden," encloses thousands of cast paper rocks or stones within a regular dodecagon. In addition to the rich symbolism of the twelve-sided form (twelve pairs of ribs, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve months, twelve glass cubes in his "History of Art" and so forth), the verisimilitude of these paper stones is uncanny. Limestone chips, water worn granite pebbles, chunks of porphyry, quartz-laden rocks and more serve as a garden of geological taxonomy. Kren cast each discretely identifiable rock "type" from one publication. There were no added colors or other quick fixes. Variations in the dye and character of the paper, inks, and quantities of illustrations and photographs, among other dynamics of each publication, provide an unexpected range of color and surface varieties to the stones. A computer screen with constantly changing diagrams of the garden maps each type of rock to its discrete publication, an intriguing juxtaposition of lithic rigidity with virtual flexibility.

The fifth installation. "Window" (2008), consists of a large glass pane that opens onto a small cubical room. Kren lined the walls and the ceiling of the room with mirrors so that when one stands in the gallery and looks through the window into the room, it appears, like "Scanner," to be an infinitely duplicated space. Set into the floor of the room are four fans and hundreds of thousands of pieces of torn bits of publications. The velocity and timing of the fans is controlled by a computer. When "on," the force of air from the fans creates an upward surge of paper shards and when "off", a gravity-engendered fall reminiscent of a snow or ash storm. The mirrors create the illusion that you are viewing yourself in this shifting environment, an obvious paradox.

At their best, Kren's works unsettle our fickle balance between rationality and sensation and rattle confidence in accumulated wisdom. Nagging human bottlenecks our sense of self, entropic destinies, adaptive imperatives, for example feed Kren's conceptual inventory. He has long had a love affair with Jorge Luis Borges and the essential ingredients of his The Library of Babel (1941) though experiment books and their institutional environment, libraries. More often than most Borges-fixated artists. Kren's vision searches for and often finds visual equivalents for the conundrums of infinite variation, an impressive achievement for any artist.

PETER S BRIGGS is a curator and art historian who lives in Lubbock, Texas.