His research and observations during his fellowship in Rome in 2021 serve as a starting point for Gáspár Szőke’s exhibition “Roman Connection” in the project room of Inda Gallery. In the works created at that time, he took elements of Italian built spaces, windows, mosaic shapes, building ornamentation and other recurring forms from their original visual context, to abstract them in the plane and space of his paintings, then to combine them with other shapes, including classical patterns from elsewhere, and thus to explore their evolving, possible meanings.
Szőke’s incessant feeling, analysing, interpreting relationship with the current visual elements of the here-and-now environment is just as well traceable and continuously integrated into his playful, organically changing language as his incessant dialogue with the traditions of abstract art, the field he had already designated for himself at the beginning of his practice, which is not without elements that can be understood as criticism.
Alongside the Roman works, the pictures now on display show new chapters in the evolution of experimentation, in the construction and interpretation of meaning, using the lessons learned from them and continuing with them. To some extent, he says, one of the “lessons” of his short study trip to Barcelona in 2023, and more specifically of the folk motifs he saw at the Museu Etnologic I De Cultures Del Món, the ethnographic museum there, is, for example, the way in which he moves out of the plane, moving towards objectivity, in several of the images now on display.