What makes art realistic or real? And is abstract art less real? The first abstract painters believed that they depicted entities that were more real that the works of the socalled realists, who remained at the surface of appearances. In their art they wanted to touch upon the essence of things directly – to capture time, space, physical laws, biological structures. Some such questions come back to mind while looking at Petr Barinka’s paintings, although in a quite different, playful tone, coming from the domain of comics, computer games, and design. By means of a game we find
ourselves in a world of colors, shapes, archetypes, codes and traces, where in our imagination the macrocosm of planets and suns meets the microcosm of biological and crystalic growth. Drawing – a medium traditionally associated with revealing the soul of the artist – is here replaced by a uniform line that with a precision of graphic design draws out given shapes and structures. The appearance of any machine-like exactness nonetheless disappears the moment we realize that the paintings are in fact each embroidered by hand and their structure is made out of a fine and sensitively handmade lace.
We ask then what is painting actually all about today. Perhaps precisely about mapping the interval of how far from reality art should remain in order for us to search for and to find ourselves by intuitively deciphering the symbols, codes and archetypes represented. But since we are in a game here, any such search does not overcommit, restrict or burden us. The only real restriction are the rules of the game itself.

Karolina Dolanska