Monogramista T·D — From the Moving and Escape Plans Series,

The titles Emergency Escape Plan for Kamil Drabin¹ and Deposit from 2000 as well as Jan Velek’s Meditation Carpet² and Patrolman Jiří Valoch’s Carpet from 2002 are a part of an extensive open series called Moving and Escape Plans that MONOGRAMISTA T·D have been working on since 2000. The cycle incorporates real-life apartment floor plans of the artist’s friends, colleagues, other artists, theorists and collectors that he appropriates and interferes with them using the media of text and painting. A floor plan is a simplified representation of a certain space, a transcription of a three dimensional object onto a two dimensional surface, invoking a specific notion of a specific, real-life building. In the case of an apartment floor plan, occupied by a specific person, it also evokes certain intimacy. The artist enters these private spaces as a visitor or even an “intruder”, leaving his own footprint by marking out new black and red routes, paths – labyrinths and escape routes everyone needs at times. The notions of escaping and moving can also be perceived as a metaphor for merging everyday life with art. The artist himself claims he has created a specific event for every floor plan. It is supposed to be a kind of a double-portrait of the apartment’s owner and the artist himself. 

The artist’s appropriation strategy takes on one other level in the series. His painter’s commentary reduced to basic geometric shapes resembles abstract geometry paintings by early modernists. The first two images could refer to Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a Dutch painter who represented neoplasticism. Emergency Escape Plan for Kamil Drabin resembles the black and white rhombus of Tableau No. I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Gray (1926), while Deposit with its red accent could refer to another image of the series – Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1924 – 1925). Even though they are not quoted directly, the viewer is able to decipher them. The other two interventions, in Jan Velek’s Meditation Carpet and Patrolman Jiří Valoch’s Carpet feature a rather loose reference to early modernism as he is not appropriating the actual images, only their painting language. In this regard, the artist himself claims it is about the relationship between “the languages of triviality (floor plan) and art, about the escape from the language of triviality into the language of art, about the movement³. 

Another interesting aspect is a kind of a performance that was a part of the artist’s solo exhibition Moving and Escape Plans at the Art House in Opava (2000) which was opened by Jiří Valoch, an important curator and art theorist from Brno the artist has been in contact with since the 1970s. During the opening speech, he was brought in sitting on a chair and placed next to one of the exhibited pieces as a real-life parallel to the exhibition’s title. 

Even though Monogramista T·D has been trained in painting (by prof. Peter Matejka), his portfolio includes only a scarce number of paintings, or rather autonomous hanging pictures. After his early student oil attempts, he only returns to painting with the Moving and Escape Plans series (and shortly before that in his Trojan Jump aquarelle series from 2000) at the turn of the centuries when the next generation of artists finishing their studies in the first decade of the new century brings along a new wave of interest in painting. However, the artist sees his images differently. The most important moment was when he “picked up the floor plans from the desktop and put them on the wall” – and they became hanging pictures. “The instant of the floor plan withdrew and made room for another instant, the instant of image. Putting the floor plans on the wall did not change anything about them. The depicted reality (a floor plan of an actual apartment) turned into an image. That is what I was interested in. Staying true to reality.”⁴  He put the form of the image above the language of painting: “The images from the Moving and Escape Plans series are about seeing a new reality that we live and experience… they are pure realism, they depict the floor plans of real-life apartments that could be used for actual construction projects. Even though they are presented as abstract imagery.“⁵ A contradicting fact about the series is the artist often uses the word carpet in his titles which suggest he perceives the image from above, so not just as an image hanging on the wall, which gives us a taste of the artist’s favoured strategy of incorporating multiple meanings into his works. 

Some of the pieces from the Moving and Escape Plans series were purchased by Nitra Gallery in 2008 and in 2009, they (Carpet for the Secret Visit of Miloš Kleibl, 2002; Carpet for the Moving of Milan Weber’s Collection, 2002; Skull in Still Life, 2000; Shovel in Still Life, 2000; Apartment in Cathedral Lighting, 2001; Vila Linea Locked In Sunlight, 2006) were presented at Nitra Gallery’s exhibition titled Illusion of Space/Attempt for New Perspective which I curated myself. 

Monogramista T·D has been one of the most distinctive personalities of the local art scene from the second half of the 20th century. He is a conceptual artist whose work features specific poetics, playfulness, irony, metaphor and multiple meanings. He comments on the banalities of our everyday reality which he merges with art, works with the word and text. His catalogue contains a large scale of media, including visual poetry, graphic scores, book illustrations, objects, installations and action art. 

Barbora Geržová

Notes
¹ Kamil Drabina (1946 – 2020) – promoter, publisher and collector, a longtime curator at Langův dům Gallery in Frýdek-Místek where Monogramista T·D held his Etui exhibition in 2000.
² Jan Velek (1952) – an architect from Brno.
³ Geržová, Jana/Mongramista T·D: Zánik zemepisu [The Fall of Geography]. In: Profil 2002, vol. 3, p. 40. 
⁴ Monogramista T·D: Nie som autor, som metafora [I Am Not an Artist, I Am a Metaphor], Bratislava: O.K.O. Publishing in cooperation with Slovart Publishing, 2011, p. 338.
⁵ Geržová, Jana: Rozhovory o maľbe. Bratislava [Dialogues About Painting]: AFAD in cooperation with Slovart Publishing, 2010, p. 143.

Bibliography
Monogramista T·D: Nie som autor, som metafora [I Am Not an Artist, I Am a Metaphor], Bratislava: O.K.O. Publishing in cooperation with Slovart Publishing, 2011.
Geržová, Jana: Rozhovory o maľbe. Bratislava [Dialogues About Painting]: AFAD in cooperation with Slovart Publishing, 2010.
Geržová, Jana/Mongramista T·D: Zánik zemepisu [The Fall of Geography]. In: Profil 2002, vol. 3, p. 40.  
Beskid, Vladimír and others.: Tretia tehla – texty a komentáre k tvorbe Monogramistu T·D [The Third Brick – Texts and Commentary on the Works of Mongramista T·D]. Trnava: Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava, 2007.
Geržová, Barbora: Ilúzia priestoru/Pokus o nové čítanie [Illusion of Space/Attempt for New Perspective]. Nitra: Nitra Gallery, 2009.