Federico Díaz and his team, later named E AREA after one of their late 1990s breakthrough projects, have been working together for more than fifteen years. They have contributed to contemporary Czech art with new stimuli that have broadened and transcended the current way of perceiving art and the concept of a work of art. Every time Díaz presented a new interactive work, he caught the public’s attention. The unusual span of his creativity appealed not only to aficionados of contemporary art. Since his early years at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, Díaz has always followed his own approach, which distinguished his work to a large extent from that of his peers. His appeal stemmed from his unusual artistic generosity and strong determination to follow through with projects that overcame all manner of technical and social obstacles.
Díaz, unlike his predecessors who worked with novel techniques and materials in the 20th century, managed to make people perceive his attitude neither as experimental and Utopian, hovering on the margin of the art scene as a potential prototype of a future mainstream, nor as alternative, presenting another option to the prevailing view of art. Since starting to exhibit, he has been accepted as a natural part of the “young” generation of the day, even though he articulated his experience in unusual ways. Díaz did not draw sharp lines between the old and the new consciousness. He refused to accept that alongside a given consciousness, freed of all obstacles that it had created for its own protection, there should be another consciousness, independent of it. He preferred to reveal the existing consciousness and enrich it with new layers and strata hidden behind the known ones. He ventured into areas where no one had been before him in order to bring back experience that had been swallowed by oblivion. Díaz strove to renew what had been lost in an expanded and new way of gaining knowledge.
At a very early stage, while still a student at the academy, Díaz developed original approaches, quite different from most artistic programs endorsed at that time. He was brave in his use of technologies and materials that were originally designed for other purposes. He expressed far more general objectives for which a mere palpable rendering of a mental object was not enough. They were determined by the varying relationship of art, nature and science, based on the shift of their mutual center of gravity. Every time Díaz emphasized one of these three areas, the other two remained in the background and completed the framework of his installations. These are the roots of the considerable integrity of opinion in his work. Díaz’s work spans a wide area. The artist transcends the established boundaries of one field, and also goes into depths where he reveals forgotten primal images that are subsequently reflected in human consciousness: whether it be inner space, materialized light in motion, a blend of sound or a symmetrical rosette. As early as in 1997, Díaz enriched with ease the attitude still labeled as art with new means of expression in two of his major projects. The first was Tacuzcanzcan (consisting of three separate works: Photon, Blob and Fermion), which took up the whole of the second floor in the Old Town Hall in Prague. It happened to be his first solo exhibition and also his final thesis submitted for defense.
The other was also a distinct installation titled simply 7. For a number of years it became a magnet within the contemporary art collection in the House of the Golden Ring in Prague. In both projects, marked by a progressive use of the latest technologies, spectators found themselves in an artificial space that exposed them to unusual sensory experience, a kind of ebbing and waning echo of the artist’s expanding and contracting inner world. Although the spectators entered a depersonalized installation, they became part of Díaz’s mind, which dragged them into its own psychoplastic intentions – the way a sculptor uses material and a painter colors – whether the result be a 3D form or a surface projection. Díaz, or rather the participant in Díaz’s projects, encountered projects of markedly distinct shapes that each time seemed like different grades of embodiment of light energy, from solid and steady to flowing and dematerialized. He focused his ideas precisely on those human senses that he strove to captivate. The sources of his work were in the expression of experience located beyond the common, everyday perception that they transcended. He suggested that our perception is covered with additional layers which can be accessed under certain conditions. Even though the artist’s pronounced plastic sensitivity, along with his drawing talent, were already obvious at the academy, the underlying aspect of Díaz’s attitude was an experience that would later surface in his work: sound and inner space. He was already using both of these as themes in his early work Nostalgia (1993), a monumental upright conch. From its coils came a dark, remote thunder whose origin and meaning could not be clearly determined and the eye could not see its most covert, dark space.
While Nostalgia was still expressed by a 3D object of a given size originating in the history of nature and art, Díaz’s subsequent works seemed to take place in the inner walls of a spiraled shell. The spectator entered specifically arranged inner spaces, equipped with sensors that recorded the spectator’s movements or speech. While the constructivists used the shell mainly to express various development theories, to Díaz it provided an image of a two‐way motion that was contracting at one end and dilating at the other. Díaz probed into embryonic forms, dealing with the preconditions of inner life. He also freed himself from them and took a broad approach in projects concerning architecture and the outer environment. Even though these were marked opposites, they did not exclude or contradict each other. They were linked by an integral, unifying form. They intermingled and merged with one another. In this way Díaz overcame thinking in polar terms by means of harmony. In a sensory echo, reflecting an idea within an idea, he freed himself from direct reflection and immediate sensory data. It was as if Díaz were attempting to grasp an image before becoming aware of it, while it still contained traces of its source, before it became loaded with the meanings that consciousness projects into it…
As the coils of the Nostalgia spiral grew and broadened, Díaz’s projects transcended into the everyday environment. When the coils shrank and narrowed, he focused on the source of life and light. At one end, his imagination broadened, at the other it focused on the cosmogonic moment of the emergence of the embryonic form. Díaz elaborated on both possibilities in his projects in the first years of the new millennium. In these projects he reconsidered the relationship between the participant and the execution, and also worked with his long‐term idea of a work of art created without any contact SuProportion with the human hand. He had an opportunity to execute this idea very early on. Since Dehibernation (1993), he has left it up to the spectator to decide on the working of the installation by setting it in motion and becoming part of it. The spectator’s intervention determined the sound, the shape and the illumination of the project.
The result came back to the spectator like an echo. Unlike the Nostalgia shell, this time the spectator was the originator. The viewer entered a space that anticipated him and took into account his movement. Díaz’s projects belonged more and more to the spectator – first of all the viewer controlled their sound (Dehibernation, 1994), then their shape (Blob, 1997) by modeling a taut, flat surface by walking on it. Díaz shifted his focus to the spectator’s body (Generatrix, 1999) which was “captured” by the apparatus and “processed” without the possibility of further intervention. The spectator could eventually see himself or herself in the least expected form on a projection surface. There the viewer turned into blazing light energy. Its movements, though instigated by the spectators, are no longer dependent on them. The spectator’s figure was appropriated by the machine; it became material for further reassessment, which the viewer could witness.
Díaz’s relationship to the human figure progressed. The following step after 7 was the creation of an artificial being (Mnemeg, 2000), hovering in a weightless space, rolling from side to side in the center of a projection surface, turning freely, approaching and receding, as if it had condensed from the white noise and waves caused by the spectator’s presence. From a state of calm, Mnemeg gradually grows into a frenzied ecstasy, during which it disintegrates and changes into a sort of nebula. Díaz showed that through his artificial being he is capable of expressing all the motor capabilities of the human body and even surpassing them. A distance can occur between the spectator and Mnemeg due to the fact that the viewer is addressed from the projection surface by someone who looks like him but is not him. At the same time Mnemeg seems to be a projection of lingering but forgotten states of mind. The gestures of the being determined by a “machine” resemble the rites of tribal peoples. With Mnemeg, Díaz perhaps became aware of the limits of his “apparatus”, whose capabilities were so great that their thorough utilization was beyond the limits of human possibilities.
Even though Díaz did not mean to create his own robot, Mnemeg loosely relates to similar artificial beings. If the spectator connected to Mnemeg identified with it and ceased being himself, he became the other entity and revealed his hidden side. With Mnemeg, Díaz also came into conflict with the technology he used to express himself. The power emanating from it did not lead to liberation but rather to conquest and control. It devoured human identity more and more forcefully. While Mnemeg expressed a desire for liberation from the body using an instinctive power, Sakura (2005), referring to the high art of the Samurai, was a gradation of the effects of will; it concentrated onto itself to the point of self‐destruction. It is symptomatic that this time the protagonist of the project who undergoes the process is the artist himself, assuming the role of an imagined Samurai.
He concentrates so much that his head bursts at the end of the rite and blood starts pouring into the white room. Sakura, resembling age‐old rites, had a strong, social and critical tone, clarified by a proclamation included in the project: “The more we know about you, the less you exist.” the individual is swallowed by the outer system so much that he can only be delivered by entering a different order. This means the individual’s end in the mundane world. Díaz was attracted by flux and movement. He refused solid and unchangeable borders. The wall that faced him in his projects became permeable under his touch, matter holding shape together dissolved. Nostalgia was followed by space installations and also by objects created through computer animation, which did not emulate any natural shape, such as Bolb and Up. When their form settled on a computer screen, their 3D rendering was carried out in an established workshop manner. The interior of the metal Bolb, commissioned for Český Krumlov, was divided by a membrane reverberating in the wind. The transparent dematerialized sculpture Up, which was meant to be made of glass, broke during construction.
Only in the first decade of the new millennium did Díaz get round to realizing his dream. He found a new way of rendering a 3D object – it was created in the exact opposite way to that of a traditional sculpture. His projects like Sembion (2004) and Resonance (2007) showed that the source of a polyamide shape (created using SLS rapid prototyping technology) can be a computer‐ ‐processed flow of speech. It can shape matter using a beam inside an incubator. Díaz got as close as possible to converting an idea into a shape when the flow of non‐material speech acquired a solid static shape created by the flow of speech. The object at the end of the process resembled an abstract sculpture only in its external appearance, but its substance and orientation were totally different from such a sculpture. Díaz shifted to a different level of thinking, which brought him to capturing the embryonic form as the source of life. While he dealt with decay and extinction in Sakura, in Sembion and Resonance he returned to his own beginnings. The wave that had sprung up suddenly in the E AREA project (1998–1999) like an uncontrolled element, spilled over the edge, dispersed into individual drops and disappeared. The same wave was now rife with new meanings in other projects. Díaz’s works lost the solid shape of the earlier Blobs, Bolbs and Ups.
They became the materialization of flowing light. Their solid and lasting appearance became set when the flow was stopped. But they can be described as “shapeless” only from the point of visual perception. They can be captured by a mathematical model and displayed on a different plane of their existence. Díaz was captivated by actual events as one of the possible states of energy. He wanted to probe below their surface and capture their preconditions. In recent years, he has dealt with this in two large projects, Sembion and Resonance, from which he excluded all color. The large computer prints were only black and white – if they can be called even that. Their task was to capture the invisible flow of light that materializes at the extreme limits of vision.
Díaz did not break light into a rainbow spectrum, but emphasized its basic cosmogonic element as the carrier of life. He did this by showing that a ray of light contains “binary sperm” expressed in the contrast of black and white. In Sembion, Díaz penetrated to the self‐fertilization of life based on the conflict of opposites. It broke down and shrank, swelled up and bloated. He concentrated on the depiction of an endless process, revealing only a few moments of it. Díaz’s imagination has not been restricted to the installations of inner spaces relying on the movement of a visitor, or to the 3D object – which are two opposite ways of approaching a work of art. His close affinity to architecture became more and more apparent in his works, culminating in the designs of large buildings (Microna, 2007). Their unusual liquid morphology was predated by the older E AREA project. At that time Díaz still clung closely to the metaphysics of the circle, which for some time was a limiting shape for him. At the turn of the millennium, the circle became the prototype of the course of life and the state of the cosmos. While he opened the computer presentation of his E AREA project with a flowing Möbius strip, an allusion to the symbol of infinity, the following rapid sequence of images features a rosette, one of the fundamental images of the unity and integrity of the world, morphing into a sunflower and a human eye, whose iris then blends into the circular shape of a building. The iris composes its empty center, from where the designed building seems to draw its energy.
Díaz, who organizes the space as a closed shell that can expand and contract, rendered it in two opposite, seemingly contradictory ways. He used a geometrical network onto which any shape can be abstracted, and a cluster of swelling matter emerging from itself. Both mutually exclusive possibilities had earlier appealed to the painter Václav Boštík, who worked with highly dematerialized pastels and simple linear division of a blank surface in the 1970s. These were different ways of capturing the same universe, which can be approached from two different angles. In his E AREA building project, Díaz also showed that the relationship between the geometrical network and the circle had its limitations. They could not be identified and converted one into another.
A sphere was set into the linear frame of a polyhedron. Díaz brought together two worlds that approach each other but, despite their similarity, remain incompatible. These are modern science on the one hand, and faith and mysticism on the other. Their differences were suggested by the circumstances in which they appeared as attributes in older works of art: spheres were carried by saints and polyhedrons by geometricians.
Karel Srp, City Gallery Prague, December 2007