The title of Márk Fridvalszki’s first exhibition in Vintage transposes the name of the 1967 all-arts festival of the UFO Club, a centre of British counterculture, as a travelling utopia to the present. The UFO metaphor, which would come to dominate Fridvalszki’s more recent work, was able to encapsulate the whole countercultural zeitgeist of those years: the “attractive strangeness” of the radical changes and alternative lifestyles brought about by the social, artistic and technological revolutions of ’68, the dimensions of consciousness opened up by psychedelia or even Eastern spirituality, the space rock of Pink Floyd starting in the UFO Club and the futuristic jazz of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis or Sun Ra, and the sci-fi fantasies that expanded in the wake of the moon landing, from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Kubrick’s Space Odyssey.
As in Space Odyssey, the UFO dimension in Fridvalszki’s paintings also stretches the collage compositions built from archival imagery in the form of space-black abstraction, as a cosmic horizon and line of flight, a fourth dimension bending space-time, which has been a way of being for the avant-garde spirit from the beginning through Duchamp and Picasso. The ellipses, circles and spheres that have covered the works of recent years are also UFO metaphors in so far as the UFO is a metaphor for a cultural ideal, popular modernism, which seeks to turn avant-garde-modernist experimental culture into a democratic public culture, and a political ideal, planetarism, which can be approached as a left-progressive alternative to capitalist globalism.
In this way, Fridvalszki’s creative arc also comes full circle: Uforia represents the next stage of his ‘future-archeology’ programme, while at the same time returning to certain aesthetic and content elements of the works he made before the turn of 2018, going back to his earliest works, made some fifteen years ago, which include a set of motifs including circular compositions, cosmic visions, technological alienation and alien technologies.
Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács