Ladislav Daněk: Point, Line, Ruler, and Man

The exhibition takes place at the Art Archive at DOX within the project Polička/Shelf.
Exhibition opening: 7 September, 5 pm

A point is an absolute option. A line is already an action. A decision. To look around. To ponder. And to choose. An action continues: aside from its start point, it also has a second, terminating point. A hypothetical line can continue on to infinity, but human actions have an end. It continues along a knife’s edge, through a minefield of further infinite options to aim for any goal. An action that continues in its decision is not matter-of-course.

A line is the starting point for all areas as well as the initial contrast between light and darkness, the seed of later shades. It is the basis of all art, yet still has greater potential than we can ponder during our lifetime. For a line creates the main imponderable – circumscription, thus the separation and creation of something – contrary to limitlessness, shapelessness, the apeiron; despite it.

Ladislav Daněk’s lines are on the dark side of the dark/light polarity. He draws with delicate darknesses, behind which light implicitly arises, similar to how poets work.

Ladislav Daněk’s Ticketbook, on exhibit this month at Polička/Shelf, is a peculiar, contradictory example of his drawing work, which in its decision-making and circumscription (creation) forms an advanced visual philosophy. Ticket drawings differ from his other work on graph paper in that the points, absolute potentialities, were not chosen by the author, and even his decision on the line’s directions was actually predetermined – he let them enter from outside, literally through a lottery – they map out the order of numbers drawn in the Sportka lottery from 1985 until the change in its drawing system at the beginning of the 1990s.

The book is based on lottery tickets, from which the drawings then developed – a de facto graphic analysis, whose purpose was to near-future trends from numbers already drawn. This notion, illusory only at first glance, in time began to exhibit a certain justification. Thus the book is, despite different starting points, an integral part of the most important element of Daněk’s work: he is possessed by the idea that one can find order – if one searches for it.

Curator: Lucie Rohanová