Mátyás Erményi made his debut in 2022 with a series of anthropomorphizing trees and natural phenomena, evoking the aesthetics of Central-Eastern European cartoons, at the acb Gallery group exhibition (New Wave). His figurative paintings, conveying sweet and sad, ambivalent feelings, explore themes that evoke nostalgia and childhood memories with refreshing honesty and humour. His interest in recent years has focused on the object culture of the region. In his paintings, objects such as chandeliers and tiled stoves (Dusty scribbles, acb Plus, 2022), which he highlights from the material environment of holiday homes on Lake Balaton or school camps, which are fixed in the collective unconscious, are transformed into creatures with faces and human features, set in motion.
As in his previous series, Erményi’s focus is on a single type of object: books – objects that are present in every household. The book covers, enlarged and painted on large canvases, blur all textual detail, the artist focusing attention on the visual cues. The book-paintings are more than simple studies; the blurred, obscure image titles, the hidden personal references, the focal points the artist alters in the compositions and the change in scale all transform the object of copying – like a book’s dog-eared pages and handwritten footnotes.