What is it? acrylic on canvas, 2011

kiállítva:
a Loffice által szervezett Espell irodában
2011. augusztus 31-ig

Artist statement

It was in 2000, in the art-school, where I first met the multiplying graphic techniques. My first prints showed my family. I simply took the family photos of events that were important for me and re-wroted them according to my view.

In this same tract of time I was engaged in the expression of the blurred nature of the memories, where foreground and background disappears and the figures' and shapes' essence is the same as of their environment. I could successfully formulate these ideas in etching. On one of them there were my mother and a shabby garden tap behind her with the image of water. The flow of water is intensified by long etches on other parts of the picture.

The family theme era ended when I started university, although later on I used the figure of my sister as a starting point for other works, but only as a tool to picture ideas.

In my first universty year the doll-theme influenced me the most. During my stay in the Tihany Artist Colony I made sketches in the doll museum, however my interest in depicting dolls started earlier. I think finding the doll-theme comes from my fancy in processing childhood pictures where me and my sister resembled dolls.

Later on, there were a period (in 2006-2008), when I pictured women. The imagery character on these pictures was not a specific woman, but a generalised female image, who is always hiding behind dots or - on earlier pictures – flowers were those elements that hid the woman. Besides this, the custom-made mission of this female character is to draw our attention to the unique and particular beauty in our everyday moves, to the transient decorativeness, the way we decorate our world by ourselves, the way we become some kind of static or mobile patterns. This is why she is hidden behind patterns so it is made more obvious that she herself is a pattern as well even if a complex one.

If there are dots on my pictures, they are composed of raster pixel sor grids. On other pictures the dots with their bulging ego participate as decoration. (Their pride is not without reason. As a matter of fact every surface and line is built of them. The dot - on a picture that is a created and discrete world - is basis and ruler of everything, the Alpha and Omega.)

One of the purpose of these motifs is to disturb the eyes of the audience in a positive way, and to question the view. It is also an aim to make the viewer search for the right distance to absorb the view. The other purpose is to express that sometimes we see our world through a kind of raster or pattern so our vision and memories of the world are seem to somehow missing out parts. It is partly because our mind does not register the view in its reality and partly because the mind forgets also. Many components fall out of the original view or experience.

It is very interesting for me that the figurative picture (which I create) is basically made up by the multiplication of dots, a non-figurative element. An idea parallel with this is, that everything that shows us a complex pattern - a figurative picture - such one we can understand, recognise and categorise at first sight is made up of a concentrated, yet banal element. An element that is surrounded by mysterious simplicity and un-explainability. A dot is almost nothing, it is nothing special, yet it carries perfection. This perfect thing sometimes transpires through the imperfect, the depicted. It is everywhere, it is the carrier of all. Even so when it pushes to the front and proliferates, it becomes decorative motif itself. Amongst the aim of decoration is to gain attention and love and to become marketable. When the conveyer of perfection offers itself such way to make itself marketable that means the loss of ideas, means a moral crisis. At the same time the proliferation of the dots is allegorically the symptom of the disease that it carries and takes on but it is not the disease itself. This is how a picture becomes popular for me - it is accepting that it has to validate itself in the environment where it exists.

After graduation at the Academy of Fine Art in Budapest, I started a blue series of coloured cyanotypes first, because that technic was a way to go on with the multiple graphics. But these blueprints influenced me in such a way, that I started to paint on canvas. The theme was the same as on the blueprints: children faces, that was painted to be some animal or heroe in nursery school events. This repaint method reminded me of retouching, which is really current at our times, made with computer in every photo that shows up in magazines or advertisements. Even our home-made photos are handled with photoshop, to make it nicer and perfect.

After the blueprints I painted visionary pictures about the coming generation ( 24 century kid, Yellow playground, Phantasm ), and two pictures about a 21 century Adam and Eve.

24th century kid

acrylic on canvas, (195x150cm) 2010