“Everything flows,” taught the Ephesian sage Heraclitus, thinking of the primordial element that pervades everything, water. “Everything is mud,” replied the enfant terrible of Hungarian contemporary art, Gábor Pap, thinking of the all-pervading horse dung, which, mixed with mud, plastered the cracks of adobe houses in villages like archaic PUR foam.
Pap lives in Öcsöd, on the banks of the Körös River, in the farmhouse he inherited from his grandmother, just a stone’s throw from the wretched scene of Attila József’s childhood. The brutally honest, individualistic art he represents feeds on the rural backyard trash; and can only be compared to the peasant expressionism of Menyhért Tóth or the agro art of Imre Bukta.
In Pap’s hands, the desolate mud of the Great Hungarian Plain turns fertile. In his new exhibition, his raw painting, constructed from autobiographical flashbacks and visual fragments, grows even more monumental and is accompanied by sculptures worthy of bad painting. A journey from the dirt to the clouds and back to the dust. Because: everything is mud.
Gábor Rieder