We are living through a transition in the political and economic world order, one that is still taking shape and whose contours remain difficult to fully comprehend. This transformation is accompanied by a continuous production and circulation of images: surveillance footage, live transmissions, fragments of events, FPV drone recordings, as well as memes, AI-generated videos, personal photographs, films, etc. Across digital platforms, political events, entertainment, advertising, and personal communication converge within the same stream of attention, where the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary through repetition.
While we turn to certain online platforms to unwind or distract ourselves as we scroll, we inevitably encounter reality in the form of images that bear the traces of an uncertain world. As these images continuously replace one another and accumulate, leaving increasingly little time for their interpretation and processing, the radical gradually becomes normalized.
In his new body of work, Ádám Széll explores this state of transition. Each layer contributes to the composition, yet their growing density ultimately obscures the very elements that constitute it. Rather than offering a clearer picture through the addition of visual information, the drawings reveal how excess can produce opacity, leaving the viewer caught between recognition and disorientation.
The only points of visual orientation are the areas left white. The artworks incorporate timestamps from drone footage, crosshairs positioned at the centre of the image, or the flash of an explosion, all of which remain fixed throughout the process of layering. One of the exhibition’s key works takes as its point of departure the duality presented in a 1964 American presidential campaign advertisement. The original film depicts a young girl in an idyllic setting, plucking and counting the petals of a flower, before her counting is abruptly replaced by a countdown culminating in the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
Through this juxtaposition, the advertisement constructs a binary opposition between two seemingly irreconcilable realities, implying that the preservation of one necessarily entails the rejection of the other. Yet this framing raises the question of whether such a clear-cut distinction can adequately account for the complexities of contemporary reality. In his densely layered drawings, Széll employs erasure as a compositional strategy, introducing voids that disrupt the continuity of visual information. These absences function simultaneously as interruptions and points of reference, directing the viewer’s attention towards what has been obscured, removed, or rendered inaccessible. Rather than simply indicating a lack of information, they foreground the tension between visibility and concealment, suggesting that what remains unseen is as integral to the construction of meaning as what is made visible.
Beyond the condition of visual oversaturation, the works examine how the repeated circulation of images reshapes the boundaries of what is perceived as ordinary, acceptable, or even conceivable. As the radical becomes familiar through constant exposure, images do not merely reflect a changing reality but actively participate in shaping its perception. The artworks thus address the role of visual culture in the formation of public consciousness, questioning how the ways we see the world influence what we come to recognise, tolerate, and understand as part of it.
Sára Krnács