Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art presents Dániel Kármán’s (1991) most recent works in the realms of its new exhibition, Stains on the Back of an Imaginary Bird. The young artist’s consistently developing work oscillates subtly between figurative and abstract movements of pictorialism, graphic and painterly possibilities of image-making, and digital and analogue (manual) qualities of creation. He employs photographic foregrounds as the basis of his painted compositions, which he always captures himself. His subsequent reflections on the images are always elongated and multi-phased. He digitally (re)edits the shots he uses and transforms the edited compositions into manually painted, delicate tableaux spaces. He engages with a single image for weeks, often creating fifteen to twenty edited versions of a single photograph. He eventually reduces the number of these to two or three, imagining how the visual effect would change if the light from the monitor were replaced by the sight of the painted image. The figures, animals and landscape details that come to life in this way are always the imprints of specific experiences captured in photographs, which the painter gives universal validity to on the plane of the universal and collective experience of time and passing. He also often refers to his earlier series as “reflections on time”, on its passing and on the subjective and objective experiences of this.
Kármán’s painting, and thus also his latest series, can be placed in the succession of events: the lived and the liveable, the passing, the perceptible but not concealed and uncapturable time and the anxiety associated with it, and the unresolvability of everything, are his chosen themes. Perhaps this is why the technical process of the creation of his compositions is so interesting: how the fleeting events of photographs captured in particular perspectives and moments like waking up in the morning, a hike, or even the squawking of crows, first become digitally fixed dead moments, then digitally revived, and finally preserved in the materiality of paint into eternity. The experience of time and timelines is unclear, which is perhaps why Kármán prefers to refer to his paintings as unfinished metaphors, whose “completion” and interpretation is left entirely to the viewer. He does not want to control and influence the personal interpretative process on which the viewer of his works relates to his approach. Incomplete metaphors reflecting on time, continuous change and the collective experience of inevitable passing are more closely linked to fictional references than to philosophical (e.g. Plotinus) and physical (Hawking) treatises on time and eternity. In titling the paintings, Kármán often quotes Hungarian poets such as Sándor Kányádi, whose poem Relativity deals with the general social, yet individually experienced perceivability of the phenomenon or illusion of time. Or we could mention the collaged text stream of Márton Simon’s Polaroids, whose sentence “I look at the mirror” the artist has integrated as a caption.
The works in this series show three types of compositional schemes, of which the most common are the double (duplicated) image forms (e.g., Branches in Constant Motion 6.). Furthermore, we can also see tripled (Kányádi’s Theory of Relativity) and single-plane compositions, which invariably evoke landscape cut-outs (I Did Write It on the Back of Something, We Remember It Differently, The Things I Can’t Do Alone). One of the central metaphors of the series, the bird (crow, peacock), is one of Kármán’s most important visual equivalents of the short time interval and the momentary. Observed (and often photographed and videotaped) birds are, by the artist, often referred to as visual and pictorial representations of the moment, of travel, of interplay, and of the seesaw of departures and returns. One of the most important references in the history of art and painting for him is the Edo-period Japanese painter Utagava Hirosige (1797–1858), who also inspired Van Gogh and Gauguin, and whose painting, the airiness of his compositions, the softness of his colours and the ’emptiness’ of his canvases, are constantly reflected in Kármán’s work. The ‘framing’ of the compositions in his new series has also changed radically: departing from the ‘regular’ white inner frames of the past, most of the compositions are now surrounded by irregular, flowing frames with drawn lines, which are also distant reflections of the Japanese master’s woodcuts.
Mónika Zsikla