The title, Funny Story refers to that double pressure that the artworks and our life events both link into stories and although we understand each other and ourselves through personal stories, these happenings are rather impersonal, a kind of a “funny story” that can happen to anyone and sometimes they are not even funny.
The white chalk drawings, cartoon-like scenes on the black wall vary with photo-based works and video installations. Still and motion pictures and the mediums of music create and new role-finding game that was never alien from the artist who is mostly known from his installations and text and image based photos.
The oscillating meanings, the romance coquetting with banality and the deep meaning humour makes Lajos Csontó the outstanding figure of the middle generation of the national visual art.
The artist also questions this middle generation situation itself with this exhibition. The show also contains retrospective elements that mainly serves as the paraphrases of themselves and are completed with brand new works so that they can tell us the “funny story” that is about private secrets and community dilemmas at the same time.
Krisztián Kukla