At her first solo exhibition, Sára Sólyom presents her monotype-paintings. Monotype is a distinctive printmaking technique in which an inked metal plate is pressed against a sheet of paper using a press, causing the paint to be transferred onto the paper—hence it is called the imprint (type). Unlike other printmaking processes that allow for multiple reproductions, it is not the plate itself that is worked. The image is produced by the paint applied to the plate and removed from it immediately during the printing process. Therefore, each print is unique and unrepeatable (mono-). Sára Sólyom approaches this technique from the perspective of painting. In her monotypes, it is not lines and tones that are essential, but rather chromatic relationships and the richly detailed, grainy, irregular surfaces created through the act of pressing. These simultaneously evoke both the microscopic world of single-celled organisms and the cosmic vastness of infinite spaces.
The rigorous technical process gives rise to its own mechanical coincidences. The print—compared to the image designed on the plate—necessarily incorporates the unpredictable, and therefore has the power of surprise each and every time. For what does printing produce? „Similarity or difference? Identity or unidentifiability? Decision or chance? Desire or mourning? Form or formlessness? The same or something else? The familiar or the unfamiliar? Contact or distance? We could say that the imprint is a ‘dialectical image’ of all these things, a confusion: something that speaks to us of contact (the footprint in the sand) as well as loss (the absence of the foot in the footprint); something that speaks of contact with loss and the loss of contact.” (Georges Didi-Huberman: La ressemblance par contact)
Printing creates a kind of archive. Just as archives contain only imprints, traces. Because things do not give themselves over completely, they only leave traces behind, evidence that they were once there. Archiving is the instant when the monotype is fixed, „when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression. […] In the instant of the pure auto-affection, in the indistinction of the active and the passive, of a touching and the touched.” (Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever)