Plan B

Presented in Mélycsarnok, Bazil Duliskovich’s most recent project is shaped by a choice of subject and an interest in techniques that prompted the artist to choose forms of expression other than those he uses regularly, painting and drawing. The five video installations of Plan B, each very different in character, are the first to present the findings of his experiments in the past half a year.

Duliskovich’s playfulness, as well as his search for new directions, can be easily traced in those series of works for the sake of which he departs from, or pushes the envelope of, easel painting: painting installations, glass paintings, artist’s books and box objects. He is always mindful of how they are presented, because the gesture of exhibition is the last, and always a unique, opportunity to adjust the frame of reference available for the works.

Up to this point, illusionistic devices, such as trompe l’oil solutions, have not been particularly significant for Duliskovich’s art. Now, with the video installations, the position of the recipient is carefully controlled, and receives much attention; the illusionist processes are set in motion by the material–virtual vision that is composed for the fixed viewing points.

As they emerge from the darkness, the video installations present the notion of getting along as a metaphysical secret, in enigmatic layers. The scene of the frequently visited Kisújbánya, the beloved figures of his social life, and even his alter ego as he trains in casual clothes, find their way into Duliskovich’s work in a way that divests them of their mundaneness.

The nudes, visible in the only painting at the exhibit, The Allegory of Painting, as well as in the box object called Art Lover, are also distanced from profane contents, floating in their faceless nakedness in abstract or anachronistic spaces, balancing on the line between physical and ethereal beauty, between vulnerability and disclosure. In both cases, it is the intangible, transcendental phenomenon of art that motivates and moderates female nudity. The visitors’ perception of the nudes is also influenced by canonized and contemporary models of art history.

Thus the name of the painting refers to Johannes Vermeer’s work of the same title, while the video installation, which links nudes in different temporal dimensions, conjures up a game of reflections in the manner of Escher’s enigmatic interactions: the images recorded in the studio engage in a dialogue with fragments of different nudes from art history.