Barnabás Földesi (1980) embraced the “par excellence” tradition of painting in Pécs, while observing, studying and commenting on it from the outside from the very beginning. His focus has always been the exploration of painting and art, and accordingly he installs his abstract and figurative paintings from time to time in a conceptual context. His inscriptions and textual works are also evidence of the painter’s theoretical attitude reflecting on himself and the profession.
More recently, he has been preoccupied with the synthesis of different schools of abstraction. The fresh material reveals a feverish interest in both the discovery of a new medium – acrylics – and the magnification of leit-motifs that have been matured and condensed over the years.
His abstraction, which is built up by gestures, destruction and overwriting, can be captured at first glance by the term ‘heftige Malerei’. Although the paintings, with their heightened colours and unexpected turns of phrase, show a born expressionist, they are nevertheless linked to tradition and to the models from which the painter draws with great freedom and associative courage. The titles alone, such as Hard-edge with Extras or The Textbook of Abstract Expressionism, suggest that Földesi treats over a century of non-figurativity as an art historical paradigm that can be explored and at the same time further deepened. The quotations and allusions are thus not paraphrases but an integral part of his personal style.
Abstract motifs in pop-art colours are complemented by numbers, letters and fragments of characters, which, having lost their original meaning, offer new possibilities for interpretation. At the same time, the composition of the paintings also reveals a landscape-like quality, where the variation in the use of materials, the complex articulation of formal elements and the framing of heavy and airy colours, which are characteristic of the Baroque landscape paraphrases of the artist’s earlier period, reappear as a signature.