EXHIBITION
This side of paradise
Artist: Adam Vackar
Dauwens & Beernaert gallery, Brussels
March 10 – April 9, 2015
Reviewed in printed Artforum, Summer edition 2016
At the core of the show is a photographic diptych of two entangled realms: one series captures artificial flowers arranged with naturally wilting blooms, while the other documents found plastic bottles repurposed as vases for wildflowers—fragments of beauty staged within the detritus of consumerism. Together, they form a visual contradiction where nature and artifice are caught in a cycle of mimicry, decay, and confusion.
An installation of shrink-wrapped tree branches and roots further complicates this ambivalence. Preserved beneath industrial plastic, the organic matter becomes a kind of contemporary fossil—simultaneously embalmed and suffocated—posing questions about memory, preservation, and ecological loss.
The exhibition also nods to the 1967 Star Trek episode This Side of Paradise, where a utopian planet seduces the ship’s crew into passive bliss through the dispersal of plant-borne spores. Vačkář draws on this narrative as a metaphor for contemporary complacency: a world lulled into submission by surfaces of harmony, while deeper structures degrade and fracture.
Through a constellation of photographs, objects, and sculptural gestures, Vačkář stages a confrontation between materialism and metaphysics, between the visible and the withdrawn. His practice moves fluidly between intuition and critique, forming an uneasy mirror in which post-industrial society’s dreams of paradise are exposed as both seductive and suspect. The exhibition unfolds as a poetic inquiry into the thresholds between synthetic and organic life, and the fragile ecologies—emotional, environmental, and philosophical—that bind them.
By Noemi Smolik
Translated from German by Gerrit JacksonArtforum / 549 / summer intl review 2016
Gorgeous color photographs, as elegant and beguiling as advertising pictures, show crisply lighted vases holding a variety of bouquets before white backdrops. The steles set up at the gallery’s center are no less elegant. And yet something about this installation by the Prague-based artist Adam Vačkář doesn’t feel quite right. The series of bouquets, created in 2014, bears the title Beautiful and Damned, and they are no doubt beautiful—but it’s not readily apparent why they would be damned. Look more closely, however, and you’ll discover that some of the flowers in the bouquets, slipped in among others gleaming in diverse colors, have wilted. And those fresh flowers are in fact artificial, mostly Chinese merchandise. However perfect the bouquets may look at first glance, impermanence, blight, even death already inhabit them. Titled Counterculture, the photographs on the facing wall were taken this year and show plastic bottles Vačkář collected along the banks of the Vltava River in Prague and used as vases for plants growing wild in the locations where he found them. Scraggly withered weeds stick limply out of battered dirty bottles. Still, there is a peculiar beauty to these arrangements. At the center of the room, six black steles look like objects made using a 3D printer but are actually simple tree branches wrapped in packing foil. They are supported by metal feet whose precision-machined computer-generated geometric forms contrast sharply with the irregular organic shapes of the bandaged branches. The installation’s title, This Side of Paradise, was inspired by a poem by Rupert Chawner Brooke. It also alludes to an episode of the science fiction television series Star Trek in which the ship’s crew beam down to an Edenic planet where the spores of a toxic plant fill them with peaceful bliss. Happiness and the paradisiacal beauty of nature clash with mass manufacturing, digitally designed perfection, and the inundation of the planet with industrial products that will never return into the cycle of nature (think of the floating islands of trash in the oceans); the exhibition forges a synthesis between these opposites that is of intoxicating beauty.The ambivalent quality of nature—in classic aesthetic theory, the embodiment of beauty—and its antithesis, the devastation caused by industrialization; the subliminal affinity between beauty and destruction and death; the energy unleashed when opposites collide: these are the focus of Vačkář’s art. Growing up in Prague, he witnessed how a well-intentioned system, socialism, was perverted: good turned into evil, freedom into servitude, hope into despair. Hence his interest in the sort of phenomena that harbor the potential for such inversion. For the installation Synesthesia (2012), he shot at blank sheet music and then asked a composer to elaborate the hole-riddled “score” into electronic music. A destructive act is given a constructive turn; demolition becomes composition. A paradox, to be sure, but one that attests to a profound insight the French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, put as follows: “Evil is possible only through an encounter with the Good.” With a view to Adam Vačkář’s installation This Side of Paradise, we might add: destruction is a possibility that reveals itself only in the encounter with beauty.