The constructive-concrete artist, who graduated with a degree in sculpture, quickly left the realm of circular sculpture (i.e., classical sculpture) to explore the possibilities of a new form (flat relief). He deals with geometric elements, the relationship between shifting and overlapping planes and sections of space.
Bálványos moves along boundaries, combining complex sculptural, architectural, and installation solutions with textural and painterly effects in his exhibitions and works, often accompanied by unexpected, unorthodox solutions in the best sense of the word. As he writes, “I am interested in order, the construction of a minimal system, and a solid departure from that system.”
The focus of the currently exhibited material is on early and recent bas-reliefs, drawing a line between his early reliefs, which examine the strict yet spontaneous relationships between vertical and horizontal elements, and his smaller “wall pictures,” which consist of four or five (different but homogeneous) colorful, curved, and amorphous, almost organic parts.
Bálványos recycles; his works are composed of a combination of skirting boards, pieces of furniture (such as the curved quarter of a Thonet chair armrest), found materials, planks, picture frame pieces, and colored surfaces.
The abstract spatial constructions, which are simultaneously anthropomorphic and extremely abstract, seemingly unstable yet stable, the world of almost floating flat blocks/spatial images, are connected to the question of what an image is and where the thin line between plane and space lies.
The framed (or enclosed in a smaller “box space”) relief compositions, which are both symmetrical and asymmetrical, or the playful structures “placed” on a black background, appear in a position that “imitates” an image. The “picture within a picture” solution appears in one of the works that expands inward from the plane of the image (beeswax – contour print). Another example of dancing on the edge is the hastily constructed “building/sculpture model” – reflecting back to the space, which is “the classic framework of self-interpretation in the visual arts.”
Kriszta Dékei