I Clean My Screen Every Day

The exhibition by Jana Bernartová is conceived as a contemporary probe into the core of the artist’s primary interest: a fascination with the aesthetic surprises arising from the coexistence of analog and digital representations of reality. These surprises concern both aspects of the aesthetic—perception and appearance.

In this project, the artist visualizes them through a small series of large-format prints and a carpet whose pattern/grid was “woven” by a communication error. The prints function as hanging images, their elongated, rounded shape echoing the design of a smartphone with a full touchscreen display. The carpet operates as an intervention in the exhibition space, balancing between horizontal and vertical planes, physical touch and simulated perception, while also acting as a soft interface between the hard reality of being and the pliable field of digital structure.

Within this virtual interspace, framed by such binary oppositions, Bernartová unfolds empirical ambiguities and reveals unexpected perceptual paradoxes. The sensitive tips of our fingers glide across the cold touchscreen without any intention of expressing affection or tenderness; the habit of cleaning one’s phone display daily becomes a hygienic-aesthetic reflex, easily turning into a benign obsession with surprising side effects that can be articulated aesthetically and artistically. No screen will ever be perfectly clean—thanks to this, the casual visual structures generated in the digital realm may appear beautiful in the real world, even sublime with a touch of empathy.

At the exhibition I Clean My Screen Every Day, there is certainly no shortage of surprise; visitors will appreciate the evocative power of this “optical metaimagination,” whose ephemeral and illusory play the artist brings into view.