Tamás Fuchs’s present exhibition is built up of story threads cut into pieces. The mosaics, seemingly from different sources, are not the visual details of a single event that took place at the same time. The fragments have emerged from the last twenty years, but their themes and stories span centuries and continents. A pair of urns from the Qianlong Dynasty, a Murano glass artist’s millefiori goblet, the Apollo spaceship, Roger Moore’s portrait of Lake Balaton, or a lone OxyContin tablet: all are worlds in their own right, at the intersection of desire, incontestability and memory.
If we superimpose the partially filled timelines, we can also see the self-portrait of the creator: the collector who knows that he is unable to possess all the objects of his desire and therefore tries to take them by painting them. Just as in Karl May’s Winnetou, Old Shatterhand stuffs the portrait of the Indian chief into the barrel of his rifle, saying: ‘Your soul is now in the barrel of my rifle’, so too does Tamás Fuchs’ brush become a tool for the illusion of possession. What cannot be bought, can be painted – and by depicting it, a piece of the soul of the chosen form can be appropriated.
In the pictures of the exhibition, the figures depicted are lonely. The millefiori goblet appears to be a double in places, but in reality it is one; it just seems to have a double personality. The lonely Z key on the keyboard is worthless on its own: without the Control key, there is no undo, no undo. The solitary OxyContin tablet evokes the dark shadows of the great American opioid crisis: the pill rarely stays alone – its companions soon join in. Alone it brings happiness, en masse it brings transience. For a moment, the Apollo spaceship takes on a panda face – pareidolia: we see human or animal features where there are none. Although the teddy bear face is cute at first glance, the fuselage is in fact as alone in space as Simon Templar would feel on the shores of Lake Balaton.
In Tamás Fuchs’s work, the chromatic aberration that emerges in the contours of the forms depicted, the power of the air to colour distance – the subtle variations in tone – and the ghostly images that flash across the sky all draw the uncertain, oscillating line where coveted possession and eternal distance are at odds. Anthropomorphism – the search for human form and emotion in inanimate things – haunts us throughout: the loneliness of goblets, organs, keyboards and machine bodies.
The paintings in the Millefiori exhibition are thus arranged in a single composition: a mosaic of a thousand flowers, but still a mosaic of solitude.