Etchings, frottages, print-based paintings – from the very beginning, Gábor Koós’ creative practice has been meticulously working on the acquisition and living of experiences, the creation and development of memories, the phenomena of the external and the personal, internal world, and the transformation of processes into images, both in theory and in the method of making.
The sculptures on display in the exhibition Dark Matter take Koós’s explorations into a new dimension. His exploration of sculpture through 3D printing is both a logical and organic continuation of his earlier printmaking method, and an introspection. In the black sculptures (photogrammetries), the result of more than 1500 hours of printing, sometimes in full form, sometimes fragmented, showing phases simultaneously, he shows the shadows of the self, the inner self, working in the depths of the personality in different situations and projects into space the process of revealing, contemplating, accepting and integrating oneself-our self. Dark matter is the shadow in the Jungian sense, part of the unconscious. The black sculptures can thus be confrontational surfaces: they do not idealise, but confront the void, the deformity, the rawness.
In addition to the psychological reading, but not independently, the title of the series opens up other deep and abstract layers. In cosmology, dark matter is not visible, but it holds the structure of the universe together. Interpreted within this framework, sculptures can be such hidden structures: materialised imprints of inner psychic processes, emotions or parts of identity. In the works, this inner, ununderstood but acting force is embodied – it guides us, even if we cannot see it.
Dark matter is also raw material. The black sculptures are indeed made of dark matter – not only symbolically, but also materially. The black, matt surfaces do not reflect light but absorb it. This contrasts with the ‘reflective’ idea(s) of classical sculpture. The sculpture is thus anti-icon, anti-memory: not an image of something, but the presence of absence, of shadow, of vacuum. This is also a reflection on the missing parts of the sculpture, which leads to questions of existence and absence – matter and antimatter. The black form is present as a mass, but often the empty space, the absence, the negative form is just as important – here, in the case of the sculptures, the missing parts are forms of absence. Dark matter can thus also be a dialectic of presence and absence – something that is there, yet we cannot grasp it.