Net pictures is a neutral and quite general technographical designation, there is no higher or lower emotional connotation behind it. It is a structuralist classification, nothing more, and precisely due to this it may be a little deceiving.
The dramaturgy situation, however, is more complex than this. We see a series of pictures of a car accident – a so-called fender bender – broken down into scenes, which, basically, is nothing more than simple documentation; an everyday urban life picture. In other words freezing a motion into still pictures. Taken event by event it is not too shocking, only a thought-provoking spectacle; not a tragedy, an accident. At the most it arouses compassion in the observer, for the police on the scene it is a routine case, and the real participants suffer only an annoyance providing them with experience instead of stress. One thing though is obvious to everyone: you can’t rewind the “film”, time. What happens, happens.
On the wall opposite the photograph enlargements displaying the event there is a single picture visible, a composition consisting of porcelain figures (whoever has seen Orsolya Drozdik’s latest Knoll Gallery exhibition can easily imagine this). This special, solemn and contemplative company is formed by some Buddha statuettes and angel forms. Heavenly eternity is contrasted with the event fragments of mortal, earthly happenings, and in the contrasted heavenly sphere situation the flutter of the wings of the angel of care infiltrates, sometimes conscientiously, sometimes with less watchfulness. The movement beneath becomes calm, then finally becomes rigid and gets into tune with the deep immobility of that above.
Within this basic situation the physical nature of the net comes to the fore, in other words the formation of a squinting perspective derived from its covering, masking, blurring and fogging effect. Here a stylised, ornamental grid is woven from small and large circular patterns, which, placed over the photographs, represses the whole of the spectacle, the profile of the figures, just like the colour surfaces. A mathematically uniform patterned, monotone fog mantle covers the happenings: the cars disappear, get lost in obscurity, as do the people, the events, the environment, and slowly the picture disappears, too. But not in its iconic existence, only on the level of the spectacle. Beöthy extrapolates the weight of things, makes them relative and atomises the things that happen. We now do not know how and why it happened. Just like with the players in the film by Kurosawa entitled Rashomon, who all describe the crime that took place along the forest path differently, and also with Beöthy the framework of real facts becomes loose. Creating centrifugal force the rotation of the spokes of time questions the combinatory feature of the attributes of existence and the necessity of the interdependence of the spiritual and materials worlds.
The story isn’t spectacular, but even still it contains a subjective philosophical issue. The picture is like it is turning against its own surface structure, like it is chewing up the pigmentation from within. It is like an undercoated canvas on every point of which it disappears into nothing all at once. It stands on shaky legs, just like the dispassionate, naked intellect.