At the beginning of the last century there came a sudden shift in perspective, wherein the fixed form of a human subject receded and dissipated into a swarm of abstracted, quantifiable movements. Form became an index of time and motion to be traced, compressed, standardized, and made efficient. This aesthetic turn was, perhaps more noticeably than any before, anchored in an economic and industrial transformation, more an effect (and contributing factor) of Taylorism than a purely art-historical innovation or recapitulation. Likewise, the aesthetic tendencies organized around this abstraction of motion – the geometry of movement in Marey and Muybridge’s photography, the use of chronocyclegraphs and photodynamism in motion studies, the “new vision” of constructivism – scaled individual and collective life down to a tangle of lines, arcs and spirals.

While our present world may seem detached from these seemingly elemental preoccupations, the geometric abstraction of time and motion is more pervasive than ever. However, unlike the brash, radiant lines of photodynamism, we are greeted with a “frictionless” vision of the world where the constant abstraction and control of movement blends into the environment of everyday life, quietly operating within platforms and algorithms. David Krňanský’s new series of works draws this reality into sharp relief, attuning us to a kinesthetic scale of looping, recursive gestures, of forking and converging paths. Yet despite this excess of motion, we are confronted with a grim fixity as these forms repeat across the surface of the canvas, blackening into borders: a fragile, snaking line is swept into an arc and crosses back over itself, becoming locked into its own iterative pattern; another slips around curves and edges until its trajectory is suddenly cut off – trapped, no exit between the shapes closing in from every side… 

Abstraction: bodies become motion, motion becomes lines, lines become cells, cells become bodies. 

Novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote of the “generative cell,” a logic of entrapment and enclosure reproducing itself across scales, generating the architectonics of a polis like a cell generates a body. It is in this sense that we may conceive of the twofold cellularity identified by Krňanský’s motifs and their relation to past constructivisms. Just as the old Taylorism was ordered around the production of the physical commodity, the abstract form of the commodity functioned as the “cell” of a wider mode of production (one that has long outlasted the factory floors of Philadelphia). In today’s world, as our individual and collective movement itself is increasingly abstracted, controlled, and commodified, it becomes doubly “cellular:” reproducing a contemporary situation in which motion becomes its own form of incarceration. Yet Krňanský’s motifs also open onto a world in which such geometries, generatively, fail: the repeating lines never quite “line up,” rendering new voids and infinite in-between spaces, promising rupture or even total collapse. Further, the canvases of past, “failed” works are cut up and reconfigured into new shapes, leaving us with a curious sense that failed geometries, like broken cells, might just provide the rudiments of a new, im/possible body.

Andrew Wilson