Gyula Várnai has made a ”direct hit” again. His installation broaches complex philosophical and artistic issues, the relationship of the material, virtual and abstract world, as well as the possibilities of knowing and mapping the world with minimal, reduced and simple means without any pose, as is usual of him. The exhibition, exploring reality and illusion almost without any objects, does not rely upon visuality, but rather on sound and light effects.
The core of the exhibition is the suspended, long and bulky black rod in the shape of the cross-section of a house and the round target shaped loudspeaker on the opposite wall. You continually hear the sound of an arrow being shot, its whistling through the air and hitting the target while contemplating this group of objects. It is as if the arrow ran along the black pole and hit the target on the wall. Várnai transforms the genre of the exhibition into a mental paradox with this idea: a virtual act, an imaginary process, which does not actually take place turns into an object of art and the topic of the exhibition. You do not see a black cover and a loudspeaker anymore, but a flying arrow and since you are at an exhibition in a museum, you recall what the arrow as an iconographic topic suggests. The artist nudges us out of the conventional schemes of vision, perception and thought and motivates us to think.
Two other features at the exhibition, the video projection on the wall and the photograph in a box illuminated from the back also focus on the above problem. There is a hand illuminated from the back covering the light-source with smoke billowing around it in the video. You do not know where the smoke comes from, what the reason for it is or where it goes, or whose hand it is in the picture and why it covers the smoke. There is a drinking glass in the photograph in the box in which the disturbed liquid forms circles. Its immediate environment, however, has been masked out in black, therefore you are left without information about the origin, reason or purpose of the liquid cone. Both objects are immensely and banally simple and almost unimpressive as pictures and artistic topics. However, if you connect them with the image of the virtual arrow, a picture of a world starts to appear that does not exist on its own, but is created from the network of your associations. The exhibition leaflets feature the well-chosen words of Krisztina Szipőcs: ”The works of Várnai make you think about how easy it is to deceive your senses and that you perceive phenomena and ‘existing’ things through the impact they have, that is their ‘aura’ instead of their real, material nature (‘in positive’), because things by themselves do not exist for you. You shape the ‘world of things’ by means of your thinking with the mediation of your poor senses.”
The art of Várnai reminds me of the puritan drama in the lyrical voice of Pilinszky that reached your depths with seemingly no poetic instruments. This is further expanded by making what is ”beyond” objects, the accompanying features of phenomena and the inconceivable ”aura” artistically concrete. Várnai creates the philosophical, complex poetry of objects so characteristic of him by banally and simply objectifying the immaterial, weightless and inessential. You can only understand objects in context, the lack of it confuses you and makes you uncertain, and unwittingly calls for complementation and context. Gyula Várnai calls your attention to the elementary laws operating in the world, their accompanying ”para-phenomena” and a kind of personal, experienced metaphysics by objectifying the negative, weightless, the shadow, the accompanying phenomenon and the excess.