While the Logic of Self-Design twists your polished musculature into infernal snarls, and you find yourself turning into a gnarly machine-beast-man loitering around in the oil-coated workshop of Discipline, you just might awaken an Optimus Prime-like, unearthly mindset: a formless energy. The nitro in your veins pops and sizzles, your four-beat heart flutters, rationality vanishing, somehow like Toguro Jr.’s head is lost forever in the offensive of colossal, bastion-like shoulder mountains. After several episodes of pokémonish level-ups, hulkian rageformations, slick tunings and nifty turbocharging, your higher-octane self resists any form of external compression. You bend spoons, like Neo (or Uri Geller), as you peer under the ore of the physical world, peeking at the dubious backstage props of reality. Glowing like a microwave oven in planetary solitude, your cosmic sigma grindset makes even the Sun seem dull. You cannot be kneaded by any force. You are denser than the word itself at the centre of the nucleus. Alas! All this is but hybris of the lowest order: your animalistic becoming is a failure, you are Nebuchadnezzar, your ballad smoulders in the zone of displaced obscurity, as black and white bodies manifest from the hazy static that sizzles after the big bang. Your song is an interplanetary nitro roar that resounds throughout the eternal darkness of the mind, where you are also the monster illuminated by the rays of a distant searchlight, crawling out of the gorge’s depths in the lead-heavy final hour of the passed-out intellect. You are a Transformer, an agent of the in-between.
Attila Dóczi’s latest solo exhibition reveals nostalgia for crypto-mechanistic, zoomorphic and hypermasculine chimerism, flavoured with the artist’s usual humour and misty-eyed bend towards recollection. Pulling up in the carpeted garage, the intensity of the works may draw out the custom-built machine animal in us — if only for an amusing, giggle-inducing moment.