Lukáš Machalický’s work touches on social memory within the real environment which it is connected to. Over the past two years the artist has increasingly focused on the relationship of the text as the sign of a specific position, and on its visual transformation to its spatial system, most frequently video installation. As part of the Vernon Gallery’s presentation at the Armory Show in New York in 2010 Machalický exhibited self-referential models of some buildings that were built in accordance with a certain totalitarian ideology and still bring it to mind. In this work entitled To the Left of Me, to the Right of Me, Machalický created architecture using books presenting a reference to a given system – in this case either Stalinism or Nazism. From books with their covers cut away there remained only the typographical form and message of the content. The exhibition also included part of the Selected Writings project presented in 2010 in the window of the Vernon Gallery. Machalický collected for this project archive texts and books that he stacked into blocks and set on a counter running along the edge of an exhibition space that was turned to face the viewer. The artist then projected from above onto some of the stacks the transformation of writings in time. Texts were written, were crossed out, disappeared, were in circulation and alive, just as it is in a historical prism. These two installations were preceded by a work from 2008 entitled Distant Memory. In this case Machalický lent a bureaucratic semblance to archived text messages. He had data on two projected virtual stacks of paper disappear and reappear without a clear external logic, albeit an anticipated internal one.
In a number of his earlier projects Machalický draws from his personal experience with urbanism and architecture. For instance, in TDK (2008) there he reflects upon the debate around the destruction of a Ještěd building in favour of a new shop. In the work According to Plan (2009) he evokes the similarities between the system of a crossword puzzle and the planning of a city. He constructs a parallel between the language context, or the sequence of a text, and the need to understand the complexities in building a public space. In his work Tetris (2007) he used the positioning of a model of homes as the basis for a Tetris game. His video installation brought new content to the space which was filled with commercial and visual signs. His project Private Distance (2009) was derived from impressions of nocturnal illumination of architecture. The glowing object, which viewers found similar in shape to houses, also became a sculpture with an abstracting morphology.
Lukáš Machalický is a young artist who increasingly aptly finds an original expressive form of themes stimulating for the visual arts.
