Over the past twenty years, Róbert Batykó’s painting programme has been characterised by a constant crossover between abstraction and figurative tendencies; his most recent works, produced during a six-month residency in the Netherlands, are another significant milestone in this hybrid process. On the one hand, the new works continue the playful figurativity that characterises his paintings and also represent a turnaround from his previously dominant post-digital painting programme.
As a defining element of Batykó’s art, the works in this latest cycle of paintings also reflect the hypnotic visual power of consumer culture. In doing so, they also refer back to an earlier series of the artist’s work on various packaging materials from 2015-2016, which has since become iconic. But they also evoke a series of paintings he made during a (partly) earlier stay in the Netherlands, between 2010 and 2014, which addressed the problem of urban waste with a more complex painterly quality.
However, self-reflexive, self-referential themes of art (e.g. paint masses coming out of tubes), social and existential motifs of burnout (burnt matchstick, fire, lava), metaphors of slowing down and surreal symbols of the unconscious (special deep-sea creatures), or even references to the mechanical nature of industrial production (parts of various tools and machines) are also present in the paintings.