The upcoming exhibition at the Várfok Project Room presents a meeting point of two generations, two mediums, and two worlds – brought together at the intersection of memory and material – through the photographs of Péter Korniss and the paintings of Joséphine Paul.
Péter Korniss, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Hungarian photography and a long-standing artist of the Várfok Gallery, recently saw the publication of a comprehensive book on his oeuvre by the Central European Art History Research Institute (KEMKI). Joséphine Paul, of Hungarian-French descent, was born in Paris and is currently a student at the Faculty of Arts of Sorbonne University. Her artistic work is driven by the concept of remembrance, often drawing inspiration from the documentary photographs of Korniss.
Since 2023, Paul has used selected works by Korniss, particularly from the volume Attachment and the Guest Worker series, as a source of inspiration. These series capture a vanishing peasant world, and the lifestyle of commuting workers, respectively. For Paul, this represents a kind of memory excavation, in which emotionally resonant places, people, and sensations — though objectively distant — can be reawakened. Aleida Assmann refers to this kind of creative process not merely as “reproductive,” but as one that generates new creations not from a so-called tabula rasa, a clean slate, but by building upon a pre-existing context.
This exhibition highlights — rather than conceals — the act of reactivating earlier “images” in a broader sense of the word by presenting the photographs, which are timeless and autonomous in themselves, alongside the paintings they have inspired. In the earlier mentioned publication of Central European Art History Research Institute (KEMKI), Attila Horányi, following Roland Barthes, asserts that Korniss’s portraits are relatively faithful representations of their subjects, yet they are also shaped by the “person/ality” of the photographer. While he refers to these photographs as having a “portrait status” rather than being straightforward portraits, Paul’s compositions—often single-figure and cropped could similarly be described as possessing a “group portrait status”. This interpretation rests on the idea that the participants of these artwork, Korniss, Paul, and the essence of the subjects from the original images, perceptible even decades later, collectively shape the piece. Whereas Korniss’ black-and-white photographs capture the spontaneous stillness of a long-term narrative, Paul’s colorful, textured paintings with swirling lines suggest an ad hoc sense of process and continuity. In this juxtaposition, Horányi’s conclusion also holds true: based on the coherence theory of humanities, these images affirm their authenticity not individually, but as a group.
“The Latin prefix “re-” stands for culture’s veto against the flow of time and the fury of disappearance. Art can keep, retain, and honor what went missing or got lost in the torrents of time. There is no way back in time, in life, in history, but art can make some leaps. Everything can become a trigger when we talk about receiving an impulse or reperceiving, reinterpreting, or retrieving.”— Aleida Assmann