Socmose

With the exhibition Sociomosis Barna Péli is featured for the third time in the gallery program with a solo show that will furnish the space with a mass scenery. The subjects of this crowd are poliuretane-bodied figures or innovative characters made of pressed sponge.

The neology of the exhibition title refers on the one hand to the ‘social’, the aspect of which is hard to avoid when around 23 figures are present (the ‘circa’ goes for the ongoing process of creating at the time of the writing). On the other hand we get the osmosis as a standard, according which principle the substances aspire towards filling the space in equipartition.

The homology is fulfilled in a special method attributed to Péli’s practice for some time, namely he eliminates the linear readeability of a possible narrative, which leads to the dethronement of the authentic, both on the level of the story and each figures. Due to the temporal unraveling of the many stories encoded in a figurative character, their physical appearance is bound to adapt to this alternations, following the distracted story lines, the flexibility of which creative process is secured by the material usage of the trash aesthetics.

The opinion that since Macheray critical theory emphasises the diversiveness of the artworks and the fundamental break in their structure after which they are no longer unified or organic, but a lumber-room for disrupted subsystems, random materials and all sorts of impulsis – forms a perfect diagnosis how Péli’s practicing art.

Getting back to society, an optional segment or concentrated density of which Péli displays with his 23 characters, we get that human resource in a Hobbesian sense that gets transformed into a “political body” through reshaping, marshaling and integration. The unintended politics in Péli’s works may get ground from the feature of pop culture that in the random linking of the signifiers torn apart from their signified still kept some memories of their original or classical referent.

More specifically the ‘classical’ signifiers like the gesture of showing the hand, the kipa or the erotic, open legs – virtually Christ, the Jews and Courbet – are linked together with other signifiers in a spacial and temporal distance of the former, by altogether resulting in the genre what we call collage in the high, and mash-up in the low culture, making the differentiation even more complex. In this method the mental evaluation never arrives to a point, where it can rest, instead prefers to work intertextually, jumping from one node to the other.

The new figurativity in Hungarian sculpture after the millenium may compensate for that post-socialist phenomenon, that rendered ideologic political rhetorics to the moulding of figures. The postmodern works rather on irony with its characteristics to turn everything inside-out, and the tale it narrates in its fragmentations is rather a mirror to the zeitgeist, than mere didactics.

Szilvi Német