In addition to the painting material, the focus of Szilárd Cseke’s multi-media exhibition this time is on the artist’s latest “found object” space and sound installation manipulated with electronics. The artist draws our attention to the role of water in the search for the possibility of reanimation after the final collapse. Water, if it exists, as a vehicle for life, finds a place in the synthetic by-products of civilisation. Its dripping sound is also a melody of the possibility of life. The composer and musical assistant of the electronic music that permeates the whole exhibition is electronic sound artist Gábor Varsás, a sound collector of our dwindling natural waters and springs.
The painting part of Szilárd Cseke’s exhibition is a series of large-scale abstract canvases, a visual representation of absolute painterly surfaces that originate from gesture painting or abstraction. The system of coloured paints, resulting from the deliberately haphazard use of tools, applied almost randomly to the canvases, evokes from our memory our experience of a seemingly untouched nature, a wooded landscape. In seeing the images, we thus transform the painterly, informal structures into a personally experienced reality.
Szilárd Cseke, modifying his earlier creative practice, has recently included artificial intelligence in the design phase of his paintings. The concept of the exhibition is a critique of a civilisation that thinks of itself as modern, and whose knowledge of nature is becoming merely virtual. Cseke’s exhibition is a reflection on our ambivalent feelings about the “AI” applications that increasingly dominate our existence. A particular interpretation is given to a question the artist had asked long before, in the title of one of his 2007 exhibitions: “where is the forest I am painting?”