“When I paint, I find myself in a vast, open, infinite space whose energies open a gateway within me; by stepping through it, I come into contact with the infinity of my consciousness.”
The defining question in Attila Balla’s painting is the relationship between material, gesture, and consciousness. He interprets the painting as an imprint of an experiential and perceptual process, and has long identified consciousness itself as the subject of his painting.
His artistic career was significantly shaped by the years he spent in Sweden in the 1980s. At Konstfack in Stockholm, he studied graphic arts and design, then gradually shifted from a graphic arts perspective toward painting and abstraction. He returned to Hungary in 1988 and subsequently studied painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in seclusion in Csongrád.
Since the 1990s, his gestural, expressive painting has been linked to the traditions of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. His works incorporate poured concrete, wax, resin, pigments, ore powder, colored sand, and handmade cast paper. On the thick, sculptural, often relief-like surfaces, the material itself shapes the artwork: it reacts, resists, and transforms.
Transcendent states of consciousness and the ecstatic, Dionysian creative experience play an important role in his painting. The experience of nature and infinite space has also become a defining factor for him. The landscape is not a subject to be depicted, but rather a starting point: the wind, water, erosion, movement, lines of force, and rhythms appear as analogies to his own inner energies and psychological processes.
“When I’m out in nature painting, I mostly observe the movements of my own inner conscious energy. I know that the human microcosm is identical to the infinite universe experienced out there.”
The works currently on display at the K.A.S. Gallery represent another stage in this decades-long painterly journey. In Balla’s works, the physical presence of the material, the forces of nature, the gesture, and the process of consciousness are all part of the same creative experience.