Patrik Proško

The Latin expression hic et nunc is a reference to our anchoring in space and time. Its English equivalent ‘here and now’ expresses, just as the original ancient expression does, a demand to act or live in a concrete place at a concrete moment. The expression is not about ignoring the future or the context of the past, but rather about assuming the conviction that one can truly experience and influence only the present moment and the territory which one finds themselves in. In a narrower sense, it is about consciously experiencing each moment with respect to its uniqueness and unrepeatability. In a broader sense, it is about the effort to embrace the present along with the struggle to influence it. This is precisely where the meaning of human existence lies. In the case of the visual artist Patrik Proško (1974), it is, however, not only the personal, existential aspect, but also the core creative aspect which fundamentally determines his work. His work has for a long time been bound to concrete places which he reacts to by expanding on them with artistic techniques, thus contributing to a change in our perception of them. Patrik Proško’s main subject is reality and its transformation and he approaches both natural and urban environments as his painting canvas or sculpting material. Another no-less important subject he deals with is temporality, not just in the sense of being conscious of the present, but also in the sense of impermanence which this author considers to be the fundamental and the only permanent value contained in everything around us. Hic et Nunc, his largest and longest lasting project so far, is thus an absolute embodiment of its name. With his typical conceptual methods, Proško conducts multi-level, non-invasive interventions into the spatial and semantic schemes encoded in the architecture of the Minorite Monastery in Jindřichův Hradec, with the intention of intensifying its genius loci and, at the same time, presenting the broadest possible scope of his work. He mediates it primarily through more than forty photographs of his site-specific realisations, taken throughout a period of more than ten years during his many trips across Europe and Asia where he worked, for example, in the cliffs of Andalusia, on a Norwegian iceberg, or in Cambodian jungle. However, in line with his artistic approach, he uses the photographs not only as a medium for presentation, but also as a mystifying element in various formats – some of which measure up to 6 metres in size – which he inserts into Gothic windows, hides in wardrobe arbores, or sticks them onto trunks, so that they become parts of a new reality and bearers of a different story. As much as the shots of his installations may look like they were arranged by a painter, their subjects alone make it apparent that their author is a classically trained sculptor, so it is no surprise that apart from “travel documentation”, offering a peek into the circumstances and the process surrounding the creation of his realisations in landscape caught on photographs, real spatial installations form a no-less important part of the exhibition. Those react on the individual places and details of the monastery premises, including the cloister, or the interior of the St. John the Baptist’s church, and present an intervention of a different type than the works on the photographs, but nonetheless with the same DNA. Their triunity consists in their touching upon all three semantic lines imprinted in the building today – the sacral, the museum, and the architectonic. At some times, Patrik Proško builds installations out of a mobiliary found in an attic where he changes its function and creates strange subject-based sculptures out of it, at other times, he reacts upon see-throughs, niches, or fragments of paintings and completes them, playing them out visually into new associations and connections. Another case are his massive “material” interventions, whether they are abstract structures in the sense of pouring lava or an oversized model of a stone crystal grid, which turn our attention to the material essence of the building and intervene into its traditional spatial parameters. The focal point of the exposition is a self-moving demolition mechanism which the author placed in the monastery’s otherwise empty quadrangle. Its morphology may be based on the church’s organ, but its function is evident. If the photographs from different corners of the world remind us – among other things – of the restrictions associated with the pandemic situation and expose the fragility of our civilization despite its high level of development, this symbolic object, on the other hand, leaves no room for doubt as to its destructive nature and the constant presence of danger and risk that accompanies it. Patrik Proško’s exhibition thus not only enables one to experience the monastery premises in a different way, but also to think from various sides about our here and now – hic et nunc. Curator Radek Wohlmuth