Jiri Ladocha: Transparent Opacity
Sheldon Rose Gallery, 11/30/17 – 18/01/18.
Text by Rebecca Travis
The sight of broken or cracked glass often invites a sensory reaction. When passing a shop front or car windshield with cracks rippling across its surface, it’s hard to not to imagine the sound of whatever impact caused spidery lines to radiate out from its shattered epicentre. There’s something paralysing too, about watching a glass object fall, slow-motion style, before it meets its inevitable demise. It is a material that comes with a cautionary warning - when whole it is fragile, to be handled with care; in fragments it is sharp, damaging, something to be wary of, perhaps swept away and quickly disposed.
Glass occupies a strange status between high and low value. We surround ourselves with it, in our architecture and interior designs both for function and decoration. It becomes vessels for all manner of things: beverages, flowers, cigarette ash. And yet, it still seems somewhat precious. Perhaps this is due to its alchemical journey between physical states, from mineral powder, to molten liquid, to brittle solid. It allows us to magnify and see more clearly, protects us from the elements, and refracts and reflects light, causing surprising spectral effects in the most banal of domestic spaces. It’s a material so fused with our daily lives that it’s easy not to think much about it at all.
Jiri Ladocha’s new series of sculptures and photographs puts glass - broken glass - front and center. By encouraging us to study this material closely, Ladocha at once tells us what we already know - demonstrating completely what it is at surface value and how it behaves – but also, by offering time to consider its many intricacies, he invites us to see beyond mere material and think of glass as something other. The longer we gaze at its varying textures, layers and scores, the more the lure of this unique material casts its spell.
As with much of Ladocha’s practice the glass sculptures, which are the origins of these prints, began following a fortunate accident - an ordering mix up leading to a surplus of glass sheeting. Unwilling to let this material go to waste, and seeing that one pane had already accumulated a crack, he began to work with it in his studio, breaking it down further, chipping away at its edges and layering it several strata deep to create uniquely interesting abstract compositions with an utterly beguiling quality of line. A real departure, though, comes via this series of brand new scaled-up photographs. Double scanned and then enlarged to 40” x 40”, these images take the glass surface to a newly immersive and transformative level.
From the elemental, water-themed title of the first sculpture series, it is evident that Ladocha has already identified how these layers - revealing tonal varieties of the glass’ natural green hue - come to look more liquid than solid. In the photographs this effect is even more pronounced. Alongside producing this work, Ladocha spent much time at Georgian Bay, studying the play of light on water and in photographs such as Transparent Opacity #2 this fieldwork really shows. In this composition, quietly intersecting lines etched into the glass cast shadows and throw fine, ephemeral refractions of white onto layers beneath. The eye is drawn initially to a portal-like opening in the centre where the glass has been chipped away into an organic, negative form, the outline of a lakeshore perhaps, or an eddy in flowing water, with many more rippling movements revealed in the inner layers of the glass’ rough, bitten edges.
The enlargement of line in the photographs encourages a consideration of the actions taken to make such compositions, and, despite careful study, it often remains somewhat ambiguous as to whether the marks are the result of incidental accident or attentive process. As opposed to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s performative mirror smashings, Ladocha’s work inspires thoughts of an altogether more mindful treatment of material, the glass being nibbled away rather than bombastically shattered. Transparent Opacity #3 feels almost ‘drawn’ - like an aerial view of a crude map, with hairline cracks denoting paths and larger chips as contours or buildings. I am reminded of Robert Smithson’s Broken Glass Map (Atlantis) (1969) unashamedly beautiful and otherworldly in its aqua-hue, but brutally dangerous too, with shards held upright and glinting. Ladocha’s photographs offer a less confrontational, more meditative study. They are works that invite closer inspection, rather than keeping us at a distance.
These are, notably, the first photographic works in Ladocha’s oeuvre. When asked whether he otherwise considers himself primarily as a sculptor, he pauses before replying:
“I wouldn’t say I am a sculptor, but I am inclined to be three-dimensional.”
This may seem a curiously vague statement, but an inclination towards the three-dimensional is certainly apparent in Ladocha’s stretched canvases. They would appear as traditional supports for paintings but for various additions to the under-workings of the wooden stretcher, creating a sculptural armature over which the fabric is pulled taut and forcing elements of relief into its surface. In some instances this push for three-dimensionality is quite extreme, as in the silver-leafed works Quiet Gods, Thor and Quiet Gods, Friga. Here, the attraction of a gossamer sheen is interrupted by cylindrical outcrops as if some magnetic force has been applied to draw objects at speed to it from behind, leaving inverse craters from impact upon its otherwise smooth exterior. A further pair of works in this vein but painted with multiple layers of graphite power and medium are astonishingly matte and convey a weighty appearance similar to that of steel. They simultaneously have the feeling of being contemporary and deeply ancient, an artefact conjured from another place and time.
A quieter sculptural edge is leant to the quadriptych The Four Directions, with subtle interventions lightly lifting the edges of each of its painted or metal-leafed rectangles away from the flatness of the canvas plane. With its angelic white support and combination of purist primary colour with gold, white gold and silver leaf upon elegantly proportioned panels, this work hints at a Modernist play upon the traditional religious altarpiece. It is here that we see the influence of Ladocha’s birth city, Prague, one of the few European capitals left intact following the wars of the twentieth century, and therefore rich with lavish Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance architecture. Ladocha has lived in Toronto since 1968, but Prague is a place to which he often returns, both figuratively through his artworks and, more recently, in person. Gold and silver leafing has been employed by Ladocha for many years and is both a call-back to the opulent decoration found in many of Prague’s impressive interiors - particularly churches - and a means by which to imbue a sense of spirituality into what could otherwise be a purely formalist reading of his minimal compositions.
Ladocha’s practice may be seen as one of many contradictions. Simultaneously his works can feel coolly minimal and unabashedly decorative, reverentially serious and knowingly playful. He is unafraid to be seen in these different lights, and throughout his lengthy career, has often played against the grain of whatever is à la mode in favour of working to his own idiosyncratic beat. His influences are myriad, a sense of Slavic Romanticism blending with European and American strands of Modernism, Russian Expressionists and Art Nouveau, Dvořák and classical Jazz. The antonymic title for this exhibition Transparent Opacity in one sense acts as a descriptor of the physical qualities that are heightened and subverted in Ladocha’s process-driven works, but also touches upon his natural inclination to shift in style and artistic direction, every now and again rapidly changing course in ways that are never predictable and often surprising.
