à deux (semantic complication)
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- à deux (semantic complication)
- a deux (sémantická komplikace)
- 1980
- typewritten text on paper, 3 sheets
- 29,2 × 21 cm
The works of Jiří Valoch represent a subtle integration of visual and linguistic expression. The words are presented in typescript, with graphic qualities becoming equally meaningful. The range and presentation of his visual poetry are not strictly defined. Its range oscillates between solitary pages with one word or a couple of terms and both concepts and long series that run into the tens of pages. Similarly, its presentation can be either visual and framed, as at an exhibition, or it can be in collections designed for continuous leafing-through—and it always contains metalingual information. In Valoch’s works, text is not used to refer to something outside the work itself; it is a subject of the work. An important aspect is also represented by the empty pages surrounding the text. The theoretician Zbyněk Sedláček interpreted this key aspect of Valoch’s art as a materialized equivalent of silence in which an isolated act of speech takes place and simultaneously opens up a void-like dimension of a kind that was crucial in minimalist and conceptualist art of the 1970s. J.P.