Eyework

A characteristic feature and artistic trademark of Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss’s works is that they are highly personal, connected, sometimes loosely and metaphorically and sometimes more closely and directly, to his personal history – and since we are talking about a very sensual photographic look: also to his body, face, skin. At the same time, his photos are also always abstracted from his personal self. They reveal the eyework of an unbiassed, fresh, sensitive gaze, thus enabling anyone to directly experience a range of sad, dramatic, absurd, grotesque, subversive, mystical experiences.

His series unfold a very distinctive visual logic and narrative that are not entirely expressible in words. The origin of this, and one of its causes, can be traced back to a major fracture and turning point in his life: his illness in adolescence, his operation, and above all, the subsequent stages of relearning to walk, speak and write. However, it still remains impossible to fully explain and understand the way this visual communication develops without any support from words, the photographic eye searching and explaining to itself again and again what it is detecting, what the components of the visible are, how all this is perceived and what relations there are among the images.

Neogrády-Kiss’s pictures do not merely attempt to capture, analyse and grasp the created image but also the act of seeing and looking. In his photographs we see not only the world but also his own gaze, his one-sided eyework, with the visual field lost on the right side. This double act or double bond – as perceiving his images also requires our own eyework – helps liberate or at least slightly dislodge our perception from its deep-rooted patterns and visual preconceptions.

When looking at his works separately, on their own, they are also capable of bringing our perception and interpretative understanding into game and action. Nevertheless, their power is typically most apparent when arranged in smaller or larger contextual systems, sets and image series, always adapted to, and making extensive and sensitive use of the characteristics of a particular space and situation.

The exhibition Eyework is a display, or rather a reinterpretation, of Neogrády-Kiss’s series Stone, Paper, Socks (2016-2018), Double Bond (2018-2020) and Solitude (2020-2021), as well as of his recent, standalone works divided into three chapters corresponding to the three spaces of Inda Gallery. Like a new, three-part photobook or novel designed in an actual, real space, in which the intuitive visual language, bringing personal, introspective and diverse emotional registers into play, is constantly refiguring the relations among the images, suggesting unexpected rhymes, contrasts, evoking new thoughts and emotions, but most of all, allowing to see and perceive things in a different, refreshing way.