29/01—06/03/2016
exhibition
Michał Frydrych
Villa Straylight
- In the first chapter of the Villa Straylight exhibition, that has given the title for the entire show, Michał Frydrych conjures the spirit of language. What is that spirit? Of course, it’s text. So text is the material of the exhibition - and the show itself becomes a model of reality made of text.
- Villa Straylight is a figure borrowed from a novel by William Gibson, Neuromancer – the founding text of the cyberpunk culture. Villa is literary fiction. It’s a place built of words. A setting for a Sci-Fi story.
- One of the crucial characters from Neuromancer is artificial intelligence – a non-human entity born from an IT network, a self-aware (programming) language.
- So, is language a good candidate for a Sci-Fi character – in the context of an art show? Michał Frydrych does not answer this question directly, because his Villa Straylight is not a show about text; it’s a text that becomes an exhibition. According to the artist, it’s a text that at first was scattered on the pages of Sci-Fi novels, thriller books, song choruses, phrases of informal speech, websites and pages of holy scripts; and later it comes back as a boomerang in the real world. It’s also a text that, by describing experiences, observations and emotions of the artist, changes into experience itself. So it’s a text that not only can be read, but also seen and touched. A text that gets in the way of the visitors who come to see Villa Straylight. A text that is not a discourse medium, but a material of the show’s spacetime. William Gibson describes Villa Straylight as a sequence of rooms, and similarly the Villa by Michał Frydrych is a sequence of spaces – "texts", into the structure of which the artist has inscribed the presence of the viewers.
- The artist presents a set of tropes to those who enter the space of Villa Straylight; tropes that the visitors can follow through the gallery space. The title makes reference to Gibson and cyberpunk, the psychedelic, flower-power, hippie fonts and altered states of consciousness, animated gifs, Lovecraft, concrete poetry (digested by the Internets), voodoo, melting snow, the imaginarium of Sci-Fi cinema, levitation, blood, sugar, sex, magic – to name just a few.
- Frydrych has designed his Villa Straylight as a project that is brought to life by the movement of spectators walking through the exhibition. Language is also in constant motion, wandering between the visual and the conceptual. Therefore, Villa is filled with words that turn into images; and images that – in the mind of the viewer – leave a mark in the form of words. The Villa Straylight by Frydrych contains text that is painted, sculpted, used as a material, or squeezed out of anecdotes like paint from a tube. It has its colour, smell and weight. It can be visual or negate visuality completely, as absolute darkness. In the perspective of Frydrych’s show, text becomes plastic like reality itself, because it’s equivalent to reality.
- (Stach Szabłowski)
- Frydrych has designed his Villa Straylight as a project that is brought to life by the movement of spectators walking through the exhibition. Language is also in constant motion, wandering between the visual and the conceptual. Therefore, Villa is filled with words that turn into images; and images that – in the mind of the viewer – leave a mark in the form of words. The Villa Straylight by Frydrych contains text that is painted, sculpted, used as a material, or squeezed out of anecdotes like paint from a tube. It has its colour, smell and weight. It can be visual or negate visuality completely, as absolute darkness. In the perspective of Frydrych’s show, text becomes plastic like reality itself, because it’s equivalent to reality.
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