Exhibition of Ágnes von Uray

“instead”

About the pictures of Ágnes Szépfalvi

When looking at the paintings of Ágnes Szépfalvi the viewer might be overwhelmed by a strange feeling: these panel pictures reflect everyday images of the commercial visual world around us. We see reflections of another artificial reality framed like paintings; only that the movie screen is now a painting canvas and the viewers might sometime feel as if they were just about arranging a new scene. In some cases we do even get a glimpse of the camera. The difference is, that the dynamic, changing scenes of a movie or TV ad are here hanging in time, composed by traditional painter’s means into irreversible artefacts.

This is what makes the viewer feel unsafe: opposed to moving pictures or a photography where the sight captured by our eyes, is known to be part of the real world, these paintings lead us into a labyrinth of the conscious where we are once viewers, once players, realising again and again that what we see is not (only) what we see.

Some faces are uncomfortably well known, others uncomfortably strange to us; gestures seem to be important, seconds stand still. The magnifying of the moment means a zooming in of the mind…and we wonder…where have I seen this before?

Well, nowhere, not like this in this strange artificial light – there is always a stray of light from some lamp or neon light, twisting our knowledge on colours, genres and the nature of reminiscences.

Krisztina Tóth