The first solo exhibition of Tamás Domonkos Németh, entitled Path Theory, provides an insight into the artist’s ongoing work on the theme of nature hiking. In the person and function of the tourist, many important issues of the relationship between man and nature can be traced, such as the separation of the city, cultural landscape and nature, or the aestheticizing gaze on nature, which shapes the landscape. Through all this, nature itself is revealed as a social construction.
We can turn with particular attention to tourist maps that function as interfaces to traditional tourist-nature, just as Németh’s masterpiece on the Rippl-Rónai Institute of Art and Design’s photography course deals with maps – since mapping is not simply the recording of information, but a gesture by which the map-maker interprets and organises the given territory according to his own criteria: preparing it for use and consumption. In addition to the thesis project using the damage of tourist maps as an imaging tool, the Foton Gallery also features works that hijack infrared trapping and generative artificial intelligence software, for example.
Can we return to a paradisiacal state of being on weekends, crossing the city boundary, if the original Garden of Eden was a walled, irrigated, cultivated area? Or should we settle for fresh air and a view of the city from the hillside Aussichtspunkt? The exhibition, which is not without a certain affectionate irony, also serves as a (brown forest) ground for asking these and similar questions.