Szegedy-Maszák Zoltán kiállítása

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Elemental visual spaces

Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák has been producing computer installations exhibitions since 1991, and has been a regular participant of domestic and international. He graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts as a painter and an Intermedia artist, works currently as an assistant professor at the Inter-media Department of the same institution in Budapest. His works of the past four years have been a proof of the consistent and conscientious use of various media, a visual research experiment that explores the interpretative possibilities of the new type of visuals, thus coming to a characteristic unification of the attitudes of the spectator and the artist. His works are results of both sheer chance and systematic construction: sometimes acting against each other, but always with the aim of creating a given work of art. He combines different tools, techniques boldly and in an unusual fashion: painting, computer rendered images, monotype and digital prints, stereograms and steganographic code, photos and VRML programs, text and cryptographic visualisation, series of images generated through the manipulation of visual code, and distorted images changing according to the behaviour of the spectator moving around in the virtual space.

Several viewing aspects are really one of the fundamental elements of any installation or a work of art choreographed for a given space: paraphrasing Paul Klee, the spectator should actually walk along the paths created for him within the object. The original version of 1999 and the stereo version of 2002 of the installation Promenade offers an experience of the dynamic image that can change continually, and that cannot be presented in all its perceivable forms unless through a computer. While the viewer can watch the progress of the creation and extinction of opportune images, the author may pick any phase at any time that – inserted into the context of a traditional panel – shows the typical or even unusual, surprising facade of this visual dynamism.

Reversing the process is a much more difficult task: to compress several spectator or viewing aspects into a static image. There are far less measures available to challenge the active eye, it can only be limited to covering the visual dimension on several interpretative layers. In the new works of Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, constructed elemental visual spaces are created through various spectator actions, and with the co-operation of the playful eye of the viewers.

Miklós Peternák