Jan Stolin’s work is unavoidable on the Czech creative arts scene and has earned him due recognition. Only a few Czech „sculptors“have worked so consistently with the reinterpretation of space as he himself has done.
Stolin’s artistic focus is oriented in two directions – on the one hand there are sculptures, which use the ready made products of industry – pipes, air conditioning elements, ventilators and so on, on the other hand he works with coloured light, either as projections or in their „televisual“form on monitors.
Stolin’s pipes and sculpture created from industrial semi-products connect compositional quotations from the systems of abstract modern sculptors – as we find in the works of Constantin Brâncuşi, Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Jaques Lipschitz or Alexander Archipenko – with neo-Dadaist use, or indeed „misuse“of found or unsuitable materials, products and perceptions, as we can follow in the work of John Cage (sound) or Armana (industrial products).
Stolin finds these materials in the warehouses of air-conditioning companies, and from „goose neck“and elements of air-conditioning piping he creates knotted scrums of metal snakes, slithering along the ground or walls, spilling out of open windows (Installation in Brno, 2001), or forming tectonic constructions with a clear futuristic effect (Aeronále, Ruzyň 2008). Regularly „equipping “these labyrinths with a sound accompaniment, often reacting to the movement of the viewer, shifting these sculptures into a creative arena, lying between the kinetic, interactive, and classically modern oeuvre in sculpture.
Stolin’s installations with coloured light, coloured shadows and light projections, which emerge alongside his „industrial“sculpture, are extraordinary for their poetic elegance and sophisticated depth. These, even more carefully than his sculpture, reflect the space in which they are installed and which, in their final form, redefines them. At first sight a geometric compositional minimalism dominates these light installations, which, like Turell, creates an autonomous, dramatic, colourful „architecture“in the formerly neutral space.
When, however, the viewer gives the work their attention for a longer period they discover other dimensions in this new space: changes to the „architectonic“construction or hidden semantic „games“occur over time. The intensity of the beams of light changes „by chance“, and lets its tectonic „organically“live (Memorial to the victims ŠOA, Liberec, 2008), the colour of the characters and the letters follows the „chance“order, generated by computer (60-120 frames per second, „Dům umění“, Brno, 2007). In another installation a short clip from a pornographic film is repeated beside a monochrome screen and lines on a monitor nearby (Im Geist…, Galerie VŠUP v Praze, 2003). This „dramatic”contrast (pure minimalism contra pornographic kitsch) creates one of the frequent contradictory principles of his light installations. The interesting thing is that whilst the ultra short clip from a pornographic film is repeated so quickly that it becomes content-less and purely formal – minimalist; to the viewer the change of the abstract elements seems after a certain time almost like a kitsch game. Other light installations are dominated by a more sophisticated form of this contradiction, such that the contradictions between the obvious minimalist order and its hidden, accidentally (chaotic) programmed change lead to the creation of more and more new minimalist constellations.
Using computer programming in his installations enables the artist to create balanced and sophisticated contradictions between repeating automatisms, creating well known minimalist lines, and the corresponding dose of „chaotic“accidentality, which disturbs these lines, and by doing so, makes them more human. Jan Stolin’s basic artistic strategy arises out of this dichotomy with which gently and with intelligence he manages to pull in the viewer to the magic of visual games, played out between geometric laws and chaotic chance – that is, between scientific calculation, and human unaccountability.
The artist‘s main concern is obvious: to thematicize, on the widest of levels, the relationship between minimalist (scientific) order and accidental (humane) chaos, and by doing so he touches on the essential dichotomy of human existence itself. The source of Stolin’s creative quality lies in his ability to consummately intermediate creatively between these contradictions and force them continually into new relations and thus to evoke new unexpected and ambivalent associations of content.
Pavel Liška
