Mission Possible

Everyone remembers the film Mission Impossible; yes, the one in which Tom Cruise hacks the enemy’s computer while hanging on a cable, and no one survives the film but he.

Zsolt Ferenczy makes the fatal mission possible, his secret agent wakes up in an ideal scenery after the chase, in a place where even the atom mushrooms are pink, and the plastic soldiers march joyfully on the battlefield – playfulness and irony are deadly serious here.

His pictures are based on elaborated, small-scale maquette worlds, children’s toys, and the installations of similar objects following astonishing associations. The result is a sequence of works of art, oil paintings, and occasionally videos, that represent the artist’s installations in the fastastic colours of imaginary backgrounds. The installations often contain found objects, in this case, the drill maps of the Hungarian military before the Revolutions of 1989, that were used by code-named soldiers in strategy games, just like in a real war.

Timelines and spaces often interlap and reality is re-defined before getting into the exhibition space, for example, a strategic weapon, a memento of a collapsed political system becomes the subject of the artistic problem. The artist takes great interest in the connection of the real, public, private, and virtual spaces that have a significance beyond the environment-mapping concept of the avantgarde installations and lead into futuristic ironic-surreal dimensions.

Although Ferenczy’s works have seemingly no connection to the past and the art historian tradition, still, we can find Hungarian artists with interest in similar “happiness stereotypes” (title of an earlier series by Ferenczy) in the first half-decade of the century: Margit Anna, Endre Bálint, György Román, who highlighted playfulness and positive endings in their absurd and surreal visions, regardless of the comic catastrophy of their own present time…

Brigitta Muladi