Paradigmatic relation

Ádám Kokesch asks questions about the co-ordinatability of forms and functions. His objects – exposed to the exploratory visual interpretation of visitors – describe their thus completed trajectory, in other words, their origins are not completely erased by the process of their becoming. The artist’s (mostly) plexiglass- and wood-based objects, as well as the way in which they are presented, invoke a kind of high-tech laboratory setting and function.

The shapes, related signs and values “only” imitate function, however; they do not aim to make visitors believe that the exhibited objects are actually capable of real scientific analysis. It is usually Kokesch himself who does away with the tromple l’oeil factor of his objects, as some of the objects do give us clues about their previous state and function before ending up in his studio.

Thanks to our conditioned perception, however, we nevertheless make associations with a scientific framework of sorts. Our eyes automatically assign functions to certain learned forms and techniques of presentation. The key to opening this field of associations is the potential for multifunctionality – or at least, a partially distillable illusion it – inherent in the shape of the object.

This act of assignment signifies Ádám Kokesch’s – not only tactile – laboratory procedure: by placing his objects in new domains of interpretation, he ascribes signs of fundamentally new functions to them. What we see here is not necessarily the mobilisation of found objects as seen in conceptual art. (Although plastic waste, wrapping materials and eco-conscious green technologies are all undoubtedly among the sources used by the artist.)

Ádám Kokesch thinks about objects with a more unique perspective. He writes, “it is as if an object with properties – rather than identity – could apply these in a flexible manner, albeit only imitating both the task and its completion.” Kokesch seeks the visual structures of possible formulations of meaning, the potential perceptibility encoded in objects. Through the current exhibition, he once again reveals to us the skeletal structure of visual meaning wrapped in high-tech camouflage.

Kokesch, in point of fact, regards his objects as comprising a variable database – provided that we consider the database, as such, a tool for storing, retrieving and designing structures of equal quality. The mobile meanings of the objects of which the database is composed of are also carried in the exhibition spaces by the connections and common denominators that can be found between these objects.

Áron Fenyvesi