ROMAN LISKA – NU BALANCE
2012-09-03Roman Liška’s most recent body of work incorporates excerpts from the Financial Times Weekend Magazine’s “Life & Arts” section, from which it draws headlines including “Wealth Creations”, “Chalet Girls” and “Risqué Business”, as well as passages from “How To Spend It” (HTSI), the publication’s insert that promotes luxury products aimed at the super affluent. In Liška’s practice, advertisements for auctions of blue chip post-war art and the latest fashions from the world́s runways conjoin under semi-translucent, perforated mesh, are treated with spray paint rendered in a tie-dye aesthetic, and gain punctuation through eyelets that unmask layers of black cling film and newsprint bearing traces of the FT’s distinctive rosé hue.The formal determinations of these interventions extend the artist’s investigations into the language of painting – problematising dominant models of the practice’s limits while iterating shape, texture, and haptic engagement as contributors to painting’s ongoing redefinition.
The ephemera of wealth creation, such as the FT and its sub-publication, act as barometers of the obscene logic of late-capitalist models of consumption in which seduction is a principle currency owing to its trade in the unceasing renewal of synthetic desires. It is in this arena that Liška’s work activates an irresoluble tension: existing as an object whose aesthetic qualities contribute to its legibility as a commodity that operates dually in signaling the spirit of the contemporary while elaborating an implied critique of the very systems that sustain its production and distribution.
Exhibition runs from September 13th to October 20th, 2012
Rod Barton Gallery
One Paget Street
London
EC1V 7PA
