The exhibition Passage at the Várfok Project Room brings together the works of three young artists — Dániel Bencs, Júlia Csapó, and János Vámos — whose practices differ formally yet intersect and complement one another conceptually.
Among exhibitions and artistic practices dealing with the environment, we are not merely facing a popular theme. Our relationship to each other, to the individual and the community, and to nature itself, are questions that strongly preoccupy contemporary — and particularly younger — artists today.
Connection and interaction between the individual and their environment can only take place if one is able to slow down, open up, and engage with one’s surroundings in an attentive and responsive manner. In contrast, our present is filled with non-places that typify the accelerated reality of our time: transient spaces, digital surfaces, impersonal media marked by alienation, temporariness, and the absence of both history and emotional attachment.
Within this context, the artists’ works — exploring the relations between the individual and the environment, human and nature — come together in a shared space, transforming individual compositions into an encompassing environment that seeks the possibility of reconnection within the world of non-places. The selected works draw attention to the importance of our surroundings — whether human, as in a community, or natural, as in the environment, which should not be regarded merely as a site for rare recreation or as an exploitable resource.
In Dániel Bencs’s works, plant and floral motifs appear as abstract, calligraphic signs — as if nature itself were attempting to communicate in the language of human symbols. His organic subjects are often disrupted by a mechanical principle of construction, by the material as an environment: on his paintings executed on patterned fabrics, the depicted elements engage in direct interaction with their support.
Júlia Csapó’s practice focuses on the relationship between human and non-human environments, as well as on the limits of perception and experience. Her imagery draws upon geological and biological perspectives. In her harmoniously balanced transitions between abstraction and figuration, figure and environment almost merge into one another, practicing mutual sensitivity and attentiveness.
For János Vámos, the transition between visual oversaturation and its absence becomes a painterly toolkit. He employs the scarcely comprehensible fragments of our fast-changing, stimulus-rich digital surroundings: fragments of graffiti, traffic lines, abstract gestures, and color fields collide on his canvases. In his exhibited works, he reinterprets Romantic landscape painting, stripping it down to its grand emotional intent. His line-based compositions often emerge on folded, cut, or re-stretched canvases, reshaping and defying seemingly natural boundaries — thereby making them visible.
Passage thus becomes a space of attention and presence: a shared experiment by three distinct artistic visions to experience both environment and self not merely as zones of transit, but as networks of interaction.