– Arthur lived in an inflatable children’s pool at the campsite. I remember one time he was pecked bloody by a diving beetle. Now the tap is open and water is pouring out of the turtle’s pool. – It’s running off my hands, it’s running off my face, I’m swimming in snail saliva. I carry home whole bags of snails, but my grandmother doesn’t even cook them and my mother throws up. – And you have to smoke somehow, when I smoked with my mother I almost suffocated but now everyone steals it by the thread and it comes with toothpaste, the tube goes around the roof of a 10-storey building.
Attila Bagi’s paintings and mural compositions are fragile, ethereal mosaics of infinite transformations of perception into memory and experience. The fragments, eternally distorting and decomposing, suddenly surfacing or sinking, are here compressed into snapshots on the axis of the representational and the abstract. Big Boys Don’t Cry is a visual manifestation of an experiential entropy, a vulnerable and wavering narrative experiment, whose multiply rewritten characters gain only temporary stability in a subjective (at once visual and symbolic) system of proportions. The fragments of memory – the central figures – sometimes disappear, sometimes get lost or fall out of the field of images, as the now objective Doppelgangers of an uncertain, freely changing narrative framework. These objects continue to distort as similar fragments, creeping in and out of the ever-distorting, elastic pattern behind (and creating) experiential reality, which we call memory.