Jiří Valoch is an art theoretician and critic, journalist, curator and conceptual artist. He is the author of visual and conceptual poetry, optical texts, photographic poetry and photographic concepts, text installations and conceptual drawings...
Article Inventory No.: F-7
Artist: Jiří Valoch
Title: Semantic Study A
Year: 1975/2004
Technique: xerox
Material: paper
Dimensions: 42 x 29,7 cm
Signed: in the back, middle bottom: Sémantické studie A
Article Inventory No.: F-8
Artist: Jiří Valoch
Title: Semantic Study B
Year: 1975/2004
Technique: xerox
Material: paper
Dimensions: 42 x 29,7 cm
Signed: in the back, middle bottom: Sémantická studie B J Valoch 1975/2004
Article Inventory No.: F-9
Artist: Jiří Valoch
Title: Semantic Study C
Year: 1975/2004
Technique: xerox
Material: paper
Dimensions: 42 x 29,7 cm
Signed: in the back, middle bottom: Sémantická studie C J Valoch 1975/2004
Jiří Valoch is an art theoretician and critic, journalist, curator and conceptual artist. He is the author of visual and conceptual poetry, optical texts, photographic poetry and photographic concepts, text installations and conceptual drawings. He also created events that reached into the field of body art and land art. His poetic texts move between word and image. They have changed radically in the flow of time and became metatexts, reflecting on their own language and at the same time subordinating the text to a rigorous concept. Since the beginning of the 1960s he started experimenting with purely aesthetic qualities of typing structures and focused his attention mostly on neosemantic visual poetry and the so-called “typogrames”. In these art pieces he works with optical and rhythmical qualities of texts and grapheme structures, he puts them into various affinities using dots, dashes, alternating and layering several elements. Recently he works on wall installations and computer graphics.
The series Semantic Study consists of three Xerox copies of typewritten texts on paper of the A3 standard format, whereas the typewritten manuscript originated in 1975 and its photocopy in 2004. Situated in the centre of all three pages is a cross created with the help of punctuation marks that can be found on a typewriter (most probably the artist used dashes). Underneath the individual crosses (that can also be read as a plus sign) there is a different word typewritten on each page: „čtverec“ (Czech for “square”), „trojúhelník“ (“triangle”), “kruh” (“circle”). The artwork puts together “drawing” produced by a typewriter and a text. It is a conceptual work that, as the title suggests, refers to semantics.
Semantics in linguistics is a discipline dealing with the significance of language units and changes of their meaning; in philosophy it is a part of semiotics, dealing with the study of relations between the form and meaning of signs. The cross in the picture can be perceived from a point of view of semiotics as a sign representing cross or mathematical sign plus, the signs whose meanings change according to their usage. The words describe the three elementary geometrical forms whose form we can imagine even if we can see them only written. And this is an interesting confrontation of links between meanings and forms that Valoch in his study develops. In spite of the fact that on each sheet of paper we see the cross or the plus sign, the text describes a totally different geometrical form, i.e. there is a misbalance between the visual form and the linguistic meaning of words. In this way Valoch discusses the function of words, signs and their meaning and their interconnections, because in spite of the fact that the text does not describe the observable world, the meaning of the word can appear in our mind on a basis of our previous experience – it is obvious that everybody knows what a square, a circle, and a triangle looks like. When we understand the sign “+” mathematically as a plus sign, we can see the relation between the three individual pages as a part of a mathematic formula “square + circle + triangle” that gives us the summation of elementary geometrical forms. If the sign is attributed a purely visual function, we can understand its two arms as a more precisely defined coordinates in a plane where we can inscribe individual two-dimensional geometrical bodies. The next level the artwork discusses is the Xerox technique. The usage of this technique suggests the possibility of multiplication, a serial production. Moreover it generates an impersonal distance the artist takes from his handwriting. It was suppressed already by using the typewriter; however, in a photocopy it becomes even more distant. We can look for a parallel in comparison between linguistic signs and their meanings as well as in the language itself. These meanings, concepts and signs are also copies that everyone of us uses, however, adopts them from their original meaning that is given and, in fact, unchangeable. Although the artwork looks at the first glance simple and unattractive, because it contains banal signs and concepts, when we start to think about it conceptually, it offers us a great number of variable meanings and interpretations. It is not so much a visual and artistic, but an intellectual adventure.
JIŘÍ VALOCH was born in 1946 in Brno, Czech Republic. During 1965-1970 he studied Bohemian and German studies and aesthetics at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Masaryk University in Brno. From 1972 to 2001 he worked as a curator at the House of Arts of Brno City, where he curated exhibitions of renowned Czech artists from the period after WWII. During 2002-2011 he worked as a curator at the National Gallery in Prague. He is the author of several monographs on Czech and Slovak visual artists, and a great number of catalogues, articles, reviews and studies. He participated in many unofficial exhibitions, samizdat catalogues and proceedings. He is a member of AICA – the international association of art critics, Internationales Künstlergremium and the Saxon Academy of Arts. Since 1996 he has participated in exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad. From 1968 to 1972 he was a member of Klub konkretistů (Concretists Club, or K.K. group) and since 1997 he has been the member of the Brno section of Klub konkretistů 2 (Concretist Club 2), since 1991 he has been the member of the Brno TT Club of Visual Artists and Theoreticians. He lives and works in Brno.
Omar Mirza