Ian Joyce Gallery

In the mind-boggling multitude of young artists emerging every year on the international scene and in various local markets, the personality of lan Joyce stands out.This, at a time when it is becoming more and more apparent that the market system, to which most artists of the younger generation are subjected, is unable to identify and promote true culture.Indeed, to have to sell a product, necessarily means accommodation to the average tastes of the so-called connoisseurs of art. This means that artists like Joyce, trying to establish a new artistic language that corresponds with the present and enriches us with new knowledge, are neglected by the system. Paradoxically an artist such as this becomes the starting point for establishing a network of true cultural contacts.In this sense, lan Joyce is active also on a personal level: he is founder and director of Cló, a residential art and media centre in Donegal where he organizes international events and meetings with artists, especially those who originate from countries which lie outside the mainstream.Joyce's first Prague exhibition while important for this reason, is of foremost importance for affording the public of Prague an opportunity to become aware of his art.The "Archive for Jan Palach", originally meant for the Romanesque cellar spaces of the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, is not just a passive tribute to the man who sacrificed himself. It identifies his artistic sensibility with the endless suffering caused by humanity to humanity, in the past as well as in the present. The work of lan Joyce provides an opportunity to look into the unlimited wealth of common memory. It delivers us the possibility of submerging ourselves into its depth and allows us to visualize relations and tensions between the intimacy of private experiences and the enormous diversity of common memories.Ian Joyce's enlarged memory space is composed of elements that only seem to come from rational or historical events. The images and their sequence, especially in his video installations, provoke the imagination and uncover links between the instantaneous recording of images, optical connections, experience and the subconscious. Joyce connects phenomena from near time with memories seeping from the distant past or from the memory of nature. Revealed analogies, for example between layers of peat and pages of books, or between a heat crater and the primeval soup, witness the artist's evident intention to incorporate the human condition in the general flow of existence.Man penetrates nature as nature permeates men, a philosophy through which Joyce shows that it is possible to face even the most terrifying events of history.