László Győrffy’s new exhibition, 2+2=5, is his most personal and reflective work to date, with a specific reference to George Orwell’s novel 1984.
In his psychedelic dystopia, Győrffy’s 1984 not necessarily depicts only the dark contours of twentieth-century dictatorships, but also sets out the coordinates of neoliberal capitalism’s frozen-smile consumer cocoon.
For the first time, Győrffy is presenting an exhibition of his text- and photo-based collages, (de)constructed from the pages of Népszabadság newspapers, part of the family legacy. The Piston Diary / Waste Calendar is a non-linear collection of pseudo-news, where the melancholy of nostalgia is constantly rewritten, erased or rearranged by apocalyptic laughter.
A confluence of past, present and future also characterises the large watercolours in the watercolour series The Exquisite Corpse, a continuation of the series: the works on paper, rich in inextricable detail, tempt us on a transhistorical adventure, sometimes along more sombre monochrome mazes than usual.
The only sculptural work in the exhibition evokes both Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist DIY works and the legacy of Constructivism, but Győrffy systematically undermines the hope of the utopia of modernism: instead of the beauty of mathematics, we are confronted with the failure of cognition, for 2+2=5.