Beauty is a relational event. A specific temporality is inherent to it. It evades being enjoyed immediately because the beauty of a thing only appears much later in the light of another, as a reminiscence. It consists of historical layers which emit a phosphorescent glow.
Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty
In Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han critiques contemporary culture for reducing beauty to smoothness, and argues for its restitution as something that retains a sublime, transformative power. Beauty, he suggests, emerges through contemplative distance given by time, requiring a reflective glance—almost nostalgic—of another: another person, memory, ambience, or colour. Seen in a new light, and through its palimpsestic nature, beauty emits a phosphorescent glow—an ever-present, innate shimmer that radiates from within.
It is precisely this inner luminosity, the immaterial brilliance of colour, that brings together Australian artist Jonny Niesche (b. 1972, Sydney) and Hungarian artist Márton Nemes (b. 1986, Székesfehérvár). Their dialogical exhibition unfolds through its title: The Beauty That You See in Me Is a Reflection of You introduces beauty as a central theme, while establishing relationality and reciprocity through the direct use of you and me. By subsuming these positions, the distinction between the one who sees and the one being seen collapses, making subject and object interchangeable, their perspectives reversible. Operating through the ambiguity of reflection, the works evoke the relativity of a mirror image—of the self, the other, or something in between.
In his signature chromatic fields, Jonny Niesche engages saturation and gradation to probe perception—how we see, sense, and register the world. His works hover between painting, object, and atmosphere, unsettling habitual modes of looking. Using delicate dye-sublimated voile stretched over sanded mirror plexiglass, he constructs multilayered surfaces that are at once material and immaterial, translucent and opalescent. Soft spectrums—from blush pink to desert rose, from dark amber to sober scarlet—unfurl across outwardly fading, rounded rectangular formats, where colour seems less applied than emitted from within.
Layered voile produces moire effects and shifting transparencies: static forms turn optically volatile, producing subtle, holographic movement as the viewer shifts positions and gazes in the heart of the surface—to borrow an artwork title. Mirrored edges and make-up tones are rooted in the artist’s childhood memories of accompanying his mother to cosmetic displays in department stores, introducing an alternative reading of beauty. In Cosmos cosmetics (Honey vision) (2026), a mirrored metal frame holds taut layers of silk voile that demarcate the painting-object’s immaterial body. This permeability reappears in Cosmos cosmetics (Scarlet vision) (2026), where Márton Nemes locks Niesche’s piece in a frame of choreographed LED lights. Rays of colour refract from the wall, the mirror borders, and the psychedelic waves of the woven fabric, echoing the elusive hues of a sunset.
Nemes expands painting into exuberant, multisensory fields where colour, sound, light, and structure converge. His practice is marked by chromatic fluency and a refusal of flatness, transforming the picture plane into environments of movement and immersion. In The Void Paintings, a mirror-polished brass sheet replaces the painted surface, embedding the viewer’s reflection within the aurulent haze of the artwork. Whether through brass, airbrushed gradients, laser-cut metals, LED lights, carved stone, or glazed ceramics, his compositions oscillate between tactile materiality and intangible wavelengths. Rooted in techno culture yet reaching towards spirituality, his works offer spaces of heightened and embodied perception, putting transcendence in motion.
Together, the artists treat the exhibition itself as the medium. Reflections disorient space; colour spectrums ground ambience; sound constructs atmosphere; material illusion produces subtle visual hallucination—and beauty awakens. Cycloramas, gradient-painted with bright colours, envelop viewers, and by melting sharp edges and corners, they dissolve horizons, creating the illusion of endless space. Saturating the environment with atmospheric sounds, a long-form musical composition by Péter Hencz reverberates through the space. Stereo Paintings, wall-mounted painting-objects with speakers, invite slowing down and encourage sustained attention.
Within this circuit of attention, where perception flows simultaneously inwards and outwards, Niesche’s vertical, column-like sculptures—scaled to the artist’s height—suggest a form of self-portraiture. Covered in silk blending twilight blue with blossom pink, their wavy, mirrored edges incorporate the viewer’s distorted reflection into the work, giving a literal dimension to the exhibition’s title. The artist’s self-portrait becomes yours, too. These personified, abstract totems enter into conversation with Nemes’s monolithic sandstone sculptures, whose solidity is softened by fluid ceramic forms, sprayed colours, and a reflective base—like a still water surface tinted by the light of a setting sun. Suggesting the presence of a standing body, both confront the viewer and, through reflection, turn the encounter into a direct exchange: the self is never alone but met by its reflection in another.
The practices of Niesche and Nemes coalesce into a flood of vibrant colours, stark gradations, gilded reflections. The unstable reciprocity of reflection—yours and mine—plays out through Niesche’s moire, Nemes’s lustre overglaze, or their shared use of golden reflective surfaces. What emerges is not a fixed image of beauty, but a sublime and transformative encounter—embodied, delayed, relational, and luminous. What lingers is not only the image or the encounter itself, but its afterglow—a phosphorescent trace that persists beyond the moment of viewing. Beauty, then, is neither in the object alone, nor in the subject, but emerges between them: in seeing, reflecting, and remembering. As Byung-Chul Han suggests, beauty appears belatedly, in the light of another. Here, that other is unstable: it may be you, me, the other artist, the artwork, the space, the memory carried away. What remains is not necessarily the image, but its resonance—an afterglow unfolding over time, long after the encounter has passed.
Hanna Claris