Private landscape

05. December 2024. – 23. January 2025.
MegnyitóOpening: December 4, 2024, 6:00 pm
MegnyitjaRemarks by: Tayler Patrick

Figurative art is in a radically different position today than it was before the 19th and 20th centuries, when it dominated the European cultural sphere almost exclusively. Perhaps it was modernism and its attendant stylizing and then abstracting approach, as well as the dematerialization of art, that freed it and gave it the possibility of a new mission, similar to the way in which, according to the existentialist conception, the freedom of the individual (of his sense of mission) is given by the absence of stakes resulting from absurdity.

Within figurativity, we can think most clearly of representations of the human figure, elements of fauna or flora, perhaps anthropomorphising other alterities, or of representations that condense inanimate and animate, recognisable minds into a so-called ‘landscape’, whether remote and natural, close and material.

However, figurativity itself is not clearly a binary issue, as in many cases it leaves room for partial abstractions, ambiguous representations, and conscious and unconscious, but in any case decisive, compositional omissions and highlights.

It is worth paying attention to the inherent ambivalence of the figurative concept, which has Latin roots: it can refer to the real and the figurative as much as to the figurative and the metaphorical.

Looking back over the great periods of history, we can see the evolution of the relationship between the individual and society, the coming to the fore of one or the other, with relative clarity. One paradigm shift is linked to the Renaissance, when the specific transformation of the social and economic environment gradually brought the individual to the centre, in contrast to the roles imposed by the feudal and ecclesiastical power system: the idea of the ‘viator mundi’ (pilgrim of the world), which had previously dominated, was replaced by the idea of the ‘faber mundi’ (creator of the world).

Much later – on the utopian other side of capitalism – socialist conceptions of the world emphasised the need to sacrifice individual interests for the public interest. Today, the trade-offs between the individual and the community, the private and the public, and the coexistence of man and the landscape have become a fundamental dilemma.

The works of Andrea Katalin Gulyás illustrate the dysfunctionality of imposed orderliness and the mass phenomenon of individual liberation from it, as the artist subtly transposes the guiding principles of natural mazes into private space.

Russian-born, Germany-based Katerina Belkina’s digitally repainted images reveal a desire to escape a greyish, gloomy, residential and industrial landscape that is easily felt as an Eastern European, and a gesture of disclosure of everyday, private life.

The various forms of escape are also evident in Szabolcs Szolnoki’s static interior suggesting contemplation, as well as in the action-like scene unfolding in a natural environment, and even in the meeting of the two: a static, paradoxically outdoor, and even more outward-looking subway perspective.

Márta Czene’s episodic yet narrative composition also suggests in its visuality the vulnerability of the individual to his immediate environment.

In his homage to John Baldessari (1931-2020), Domonkos Benyovszky-Szűcs confronts the portraits of suicidal individuals with an objective yet emotional dimension, who may be familiar from publicised yet usually perceived private situations.

Tayler Patrick Nicholas’s child-centred and object-oriented still lifes, strongly approached without human presence, point to the almost negated, trap-like situation of a truly human, comfortably private environment.

The works in the exhibition reflect on the relationship between the individual and the community, the private and the public, and the human and the landscape, using a variety of figurative devices and approaches, revealing both the dichotomous and interdependent duality of these elements.