Eszter Ronga’s painting can best be described in terms of minimalist landscape, to which we can immediately add that her art brilliantly reinterprets the concept of staffage after the post-digital turn. Her figures are most closely related to those of the European painting tradition, who can best be identified as anonymous characters in the large landscape compositions, or, in today’s terms, as extras. They are the multitude; the ordinary, everyday people who, across the ages, go about their daily routines with the same constant joie de vivre, or even boredom. They have been constant figures in painting since the 16th century. Sometimes as a truly incidental ‘ornamental’ element, at other times – especially in the case of landscapes or life scenes in the German Lowlands – they are elevated to the status of protagonists, even if they are anonymous. In Ronga’s painting, they are the protagonists who populate the empty, homogeneous surfaces, transforming the monochrome color field into space, the background into landscape. Their size, their relationship to each other, their shadows and their movement create in our minds the illusion of a landscape born in space.
This color-based painting, with its tool-less minimalism, is most akin to monochrome painting and photography, while the characterful figures painted on the plane with tiny brushstrokes transform the canvas, which resembles an appropriated wall surface, into a stage-like landscape similar to street art. Despite their impersonality, the figures become expressive through their postures, movements and relationships to each other. Her painterly minimalism could hardly be further enhanced, as he leaves so much of the picture that we are left with little to grasp beyond the basic color and the figures. The mood, the space, the subject matter are all composed in the mind of the viewer.
Ronga responds perfectly to the repetitiveness of our time; her paintings lack the directing and cohesive force of the leitmotif, just as our contemporary society lacks a grand, shared narrative. We search in vain for a theme or a handle in his paintings. The field of color – like the endlessly scrolling feed on a smartphone screen – can be continued indefinitely without finding the point. The cut-out of the canvas is therefore contingent; the view can be continued anywhere, it is an open composition. Yet the mood of the images is dominated by the positive radiance of the colors. Ronga’s paintings thus do not become carriers of heavy content, because they retain the outwardness of graffiti and graffiti, the lightness of a fresco, the spontaneity of a snapshot. It is as if the deep thoughtfulness of a monochrome exhibition were transformed into a brilliantly simple and human experience by an unruly graffiti artist, punctuated by a few improvised, witty figures.