Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art’s latest exhibition, New York, 1991, presents previously unknown works by artist Tamás Soós, related to the memories of his epochal travels in America. In the 1980s, Tamás Soós gained his rich travel experiences, as well as visual and artistic insight, and encountered the worldly life of the ‘West’ in Boswil, Switzerland, where he worked for several months and presented his first museum exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus. He then made his way to Toronto, Canada, where he was featured in a group exhibition of Hungarian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The large-scale endeavour of ‘crossing the ocean’ and experiencing complete freedom was rounded off by a ten-day trip to New York in the last months of 1991. The visual and (multi)cultural diversity, architecture, grandeur and unfamiliarity of the metropolis(s) made an extraordinary impression on him. The impressions of his trip to New York were captured on the black and white and colour film rolls of his Zenit camera as visual mementos. Upon returning home from his American trip, he immediately developed his analogue photographs. Instead of arranging the recordings of his personal experiences in photo albums, he turned them into a series of works that processed the reminiscences of his trip.
Soós likes working with photographs, which are never intended as a professional exploitation of the medium’s possibilities, but rather as analogue recordings of visual impressions, or as Polaroid images that he himself defines as ‘chance paintings’, made since the early 1980s and accumulated over decades. The street photographs, selfies, building and window shots of New York, capturing memories of a 1991 trip, thus became part of a group of works as the compositional centre of a 33-piece series. The ‘crafty aesthetic’ of the painted cardboard cut-outs that surround (and practically support) each photo is imbued with a sense of effortless lightness and an Eastern European flair.
The juxtaposed individual photographs and the painted cardboard cut-outs give the impression of formally coordinated, structurally coherent dual compositions. This relationship is delicately balanced as the artist moves from composition to composition, so that we never get the impression that the images, which evoke snapshots of the gleaming metropolis, are grander or more sublime than the ‘cheap’ structural surrounds of almost ephemeral material around them. The glimpses of life are ‘images within images’ that come to life as documents of the artist’s fragments of memory in abstract (pictorial) spaces. The cut-outs, which are mostly geometric in shape and bordered by angular edges, still show here and there motifs that evoke the neo-geo spirit of the uniquely abstract world of postmodern Hungarian art of the late 1980s, while the last two pieces of the series (New York 32, New York 33) close the sequence as a reduced subject of forms. In these non-photographic compositions, the layering of cardboard cut-outs, glued and painted on top of each other, already strive towards the third dimension, forming a New York skyscraper (New York, 33) and a design object fusing curved and angular forms (New York, 32) with an almost spatial plasticity.
In addition to the series of 33 pieces, the exhibition space also features two new large-scale panels by the artist that evoke reminiscences of his 1991 trip to New York. These are based on two early compositions — a selfie photographed in the reflection of a windowpane and an analogue photograph taken as a cityscape — which the artist enlarged, printed as a giclée and then painted over with an additional layer of paint. In the case of the new panel images, the order of layering of the compositions was then “reversed”: this time, the painted bases no longer carry the photographs, but the (enlarged and) printed shots became the bases of the works. In the paintings, the “baroque melancholia” forms are already visible, which have been defining and iconic elements of Tamás Soós’s oeuvre from the 1980s onward.
Mónika Zsikla