The meeting of these two artists on a gallery wall comes as just as much of a surprise to the artists and the curator as it does to those encountering the visual worlds of Viktória Kalán and Dániel Tomecz for the first time. The sources of inspiration for these two young painters are quite different: while in Kalán’s paintings the memory of personally experienced “climate anxiety” now appears, from a sufficient distance, as grotesque situational exercises, Tomecz’s “visual archaeology” arrives at a similarly complex painterly style through research, deconstruction, and a love of painting. Although their starting points are quite different, the end result is, perhaps precisely because of their respect for painting and the medium, similarly complex. Their paintings reveal layers of reality that we can encounter only through their art.
Viktória Kalán’s enlarged, mutant figures sometimes resemble toys or stuffed animals, most often taking human form and engaging in human activities. With their unusual proportions and compositions, they astonish, compel us to pause, and provoke thought. Their impersonal movements evoke ritualistic actions, while their colorful patchwork environments sometimes resemble dioramas and at other times stage-like landscapes. Despite their staged nature, these monumental figures sometimes evoke the atmosphere of stolen moments captured in a snapshot. It is as if the figures had been caught on camera in the midst of some forbidden activity. Alongside his paintings, Kalán creates small collages from paper and newspaper clippings. The works, however, achieve their final form as oil paintings with a strong texture, applied thickly with a impasto brushstroke. Their intense, saturated colors can even be interpreted as abstract surfaces. The strength of the paintings lies primarily in the fact that the distressing theme takes on a humorous, grotesque form, and is thus imbued with self-irony. The animal-headed people are at once terrifying, yet clumsy and deserving of sympathy. Their solitary activities are mostly unfinished and futile, as if they themselves do not believe they will ever complete them.
In Dániel Tomecz’s photographs, the absurdity of reality becomes tangible through the familiarity of found images. The painterly use of the atmosphere of family albums or the standardized poses used to capture significant moments creates a familiar motif in which the “viewer” can recognize themselves time and again. The banality of everyday life goes hand in hand with the absurdity of the captured moment. Tomecz uses digitally distorted photos to create the imagery, which he sometimes translates into large-scale oil paintings, at other times into more intimate watercolors, or even into cyanotypes. By erasing individual layers of color and highlighting others, his paintings undergo a distinctive alienation and a high degree of abstraction. The divided picture plane reflects both the fragmented surfaces of social media and the fragmentation of our attention. In his painting, the use of material and color bears a strong resemblance to the overall aesthetic of Kalán’s works.
János Schneller, curator, art historian