The E60 is an 8,200-kilometre road linking Western Europe and Central Asia. The art of Pista Horror (István Máriás) hitchhikes along it, like a backpacker intoxicated by the idea of wild camping. On his travels he collects symbols as souvenirs, his many keepsakes barely fitting on the fridge door – he picked up Dadaism and its process of automatic writing in the Loire River Valley, and in Bavaria he listened to some lectures on figurative painting, he fell in love with tidy, corny villages around Burgerland, saw a haystack and a prefab house in the Hungarian Fallow, a bear and a gypsy palace in Transylvania, and the many Istans filled his head with vases, carpets, tigers, palm trees and lotuses.
Time also goes round in 80 days – Pista Horror’s surreal, sometimes visionary images swim in the muddy pool of history, where childhood memories float like frog larvae. In this Eastern European romance, the peasant world of the past, the fairytale pine forests, the decaying industrialisation of the Ceaușescu era and the mass culture of the 21st century are layered on top of each other, compressed into a single sociological slab of rock. His pop-art symbol set, however far it travels, always returns to where it started: dancing bears, whether circus animals, totems, symbols of power, stuffed animals or honey-eating cubs.