Gergely Szatmári’s previous series have also been imbued with a quality of attention that goes beyond the surface, into the depths of meaning.
It is this patient attention, born out of introspection, that brings him a more layered visual experience and becomes meaningful photography in his creative work. The result of his persistent process of ‘scanning’ is a dense visual description on the surface of the image, in which the creative decision itself, which determines the technical method of image-making, is also a carrier of meaning. The exhibition is thus also based on the question of how the co-presence of digital and analogue images and image-making makes the relationship between the two explorable.
The Tiger in Moonlight series is a coherent continuation of her previous works: pure compositions, visual interpretations based on classical aesthetics, subtle highlights and her usual bravura – using visual means to make tangible what is the deeper, more tangible content of the view.
The spaces he depicts can be natural landscapes or built objects, but in each case they carry a structure in themselves, so that they can be built up into a whole through their spatial relationships to each other. Nature and the built environment, the buildings, do not suppress each other, but exist in relation to each other in the space of the picture.
The traces of utopian architectural experiments, human and environmental signs of the 20th century, paint a contemporary vision of the future, of what is to come. The landscapes of Satu Mare exist in their presentness in a possible future, and the way in which they are captured, however familiar the elements in his images, calls into question their mundanity. To achieve this, he uses a variety of creative devices: special perspectives, surprising cropping, highlighting a figure or a situation, or a sensuous capture of the atmosphere. He also uses them to conceal the essence, so that it can be felt across the entire surface of the picture. Szatmári’s inner sense of direction and proportion is solidly grounded, with each image having just the right amount of visual elements to create the aforementioned atmosphere and sacred feeling.
The drama does not derive from the causality of the visible events, it is simply the fragility of existence that makes it appear in the descriptive nature of the images.