Spring Exhibits I.

Today's blog post will introduce two inspiring exhibitions that I had the opportunity to check out during spring break. Apart from involving the artworks of contemporary artists, the two exhibits have another curiosity: they are just a few steps away from each other, since one of them was in Trafó, while the other one in Tündérgyár.

OUTPOST - The Critical Space

Contributing artists: Tomáš Džadoň, Halász

Péter Tamás - Domián Gyula, Kokesch Ádám, Pavla Sceranková

The works strongly reflect on the Eastern and Middle-European identity, and the region's social and economical tendencies. In other words, it is an abstract scenery of our region's past and present, which aims to have an impact on all the senses.

The installations have a gloomy atmosphere: almost all of them carries an apocalyptical desolation, which is, however, balanced by the playful irony most of the artists manage to plant into their pieces. The exhibit daintily avoids every opportunity to pass the borders of kitsch. Most of the works are simple, cheap, yet witty creations (like the photoelectric rural gate, which locks out every visitor). Their mutual feature is that they all convey a sense of homemadeness. This so-called "garage-aesthetics" is highly valued by the contributing artists, who suggest that this gadgeteering spirit is a great strength of the regions' contemporary art. Still, the minimalistic materials are all re-defined by our today's high-technology, resulting in perplexing contradictions or paradoxes.

Perhaps the most outstanding piece of the exhibition is Halász Péter Tamás's and Domián Gyula's strange hybrid of a stealth aircraft and a casual ward for the homeless. The fact that the plane is undetectable by radars transmits a bitter message regarding the treatment of homeless people, how are just as marginalized and invisible as the military plane.

The exhibition was open till 23, April, and it will probably be soon followed by another one involving the works of contemporary artists.

Balázs László - XV. Varnyú

The other exhibit I checked out was Balázs László's "XV. Varnyú"-exhibition, which is characterized by the artist's borrowed motto: "Only the insane take themselves quite seriously."

Tündérgyár is a quite pleasant and spatious tavern, which is famous for its hospitality towards alternative music bands. The place stays true to its spirit, and continues to promote those performers or artists, who are somewhat on the periphery, and one of their new projects is the organization of exhibitions.

Thus, for a month, Balázs László's charming, mischievous, and incredibly lively illustrations are decorating the walls of Tündérgyár. The artist claims that he gets his inspiration from the tiny morsels of impacts that he encounters during his everyday life, then these little details are transformed by a group of playful elves in his head. He must be right, because his visual world is vivid and magical, yet it always holds a crooked mirror to the human nature or society as a whole. Another interesting trait of his works is the distinctive and quirky language that he uses to reinforce his messages, which are conveyed by the monsterlike, yet, amiable figures he creates.

All in all, the general imagery and effect that his illustrations form is quite indescribable because of their originality and idiosyncracy. Therefore, it is strongly recommended for anyone who is interested in a bunch of smile-raising and cartoonlike pictures to check out Balázs lászló's blog (http://varnyu.eu/) or see the exhibit itself while enjoying a glass of beer with a couple of friends.

Images of Isolation

Today's blog entry will cover two works of two artists, who were most often associated with surrealism, but remained on the peripheries of the movement. The first one is the Belgian painter, René Magritte, and the second one is the Mexican icon, Frida Kahlo. Both painters were idyosyncraticly genuine representatives of the chance encounter of that infamous sewing machine and the umbrella.

René Magritte - The Lovers

While Magritte was introverted in his personal life, he was eccentric in his art, which made him a primary figure of surrealism. Like many of his fellow artists, he liked to shed a new light on everyday objects and experiences, bringing their forgotten or undiscovered meanings to the surface. The Lovers (1928) is a forcibly descriptive example for this phenomenon.

The painting; however, is a real riddle. The number of the associations that stem from it are just as infinite as the different, yet inherently similar forms of love which the work depicts. The painting may emphasize the eternal nature of love: although its subject and face might change, it borns and florishes throughout a person's lifetime. Or it might refer to the well-known saying: "love is blind." In that case, the piece suggests that even though the veiled faces are desperate to approach and touch each other, they will always be separated by the different identities they conceal.

(Perhaps one of the most beautiful and expressive summary of this intrinsic inaccessibility that two lovers experience is this quote from the movie, Unmade Beds: "That it's an illusion to pretend that we can bridge the gap between your thoughts and mine. For you, every person is like a planet and two different planets can never become one. Two people together will always be: one plus one. I preferred to think of us as bubbles, because when they touch, they merge into one another like when two people make love. But now I know what you meant. Two people together will always be one plus one.")

About making love: if we would like to interpret the title of the artwork literally, then we are dealing with a case of the mutual anonymity of two persons who only form a fragile bondage to find short-term pleasure through each other. In that situation, it is only the surface of each other that these two osculate. The rest, the individual characteristics of the face, which are the expletives of the soul, remains untouched in this encounter.

Although the treasury of associations in connection with The Lovers seems unexploitable, the ars poetica of Magritte, namely that the quest for a rational subtext is futile, might set bounds to one's inclination to spend hours trying to find the perfect interpretation for it. According to him, the mystery of art, just like the covered lovers in his painting, is genuinely unknowable.

Frida Kahlo -The Broken Column

Kahlo, who is perhaps the most renowned Mexican woman, was an incredibly colorful and talented artist. Her oeuvre encompasses numerous recurring themes: her own femininity, failures, losses, a strong sense of national identity, her leftist political notions, the effervescent versatility of nature, and the like. Yet, one of the most conspicuous features of her art is a constant presence of duality: although her motto was "viva la vida," the life that she celebrated so much was underborn with an unimaginable amount of suffering.

In her teenage years, Frida had to endure an almost fatal and life-changing bus crash, which mutilated her for the rest of her life, and put her thr ough a neverending series of unsuccessful procedures to hold her body together. Although she gave evidence of an unparalelled fortitude regarding physical pain, she had to withstand plenty of hurtful events due to the infidelity of her adored husband, Diego Rivera, as well.

The Broken Column (1944) is one of the most powerful works among her countless self-portraits. Kahlo was a naive painter, and an autodidact; still, her paintings carry an extremely impressive and cathartic sense of anguish. The piece reveals her two-sided affliction: the broken spine symbolizes her suffering on a somatic level, and the immeasurable amount of small nails lodged in her skin stand for the emotional distress she was experiencing owing to Rivera's affairs. Kahlo always depicts her feelings in a bewilderingly sincere manner: the dense tears in her eyes show that the aches she has to sustain are both constant and excruciating. Moreover, contrarily to the majority of her artworks, in which she depicts herself in the company of her beloved pets, or her husband, she is all alone in this painting. This shows that she was always experiencing a sense of imperishable loneliness, since her dreadful and unique condition isolated her from the people around her.

Although the audience gets the impression that the iron corset is the only thing that saves her from utter disintegration, her incredible fortitude is also present on the picture. Even though she's crying, she stares at the viewer in an unflinching manner. Her glance and her posture both convey a sense of strength and proudness. Although she is miserable, Frida is invincible in her nudity and vulnerability.

Another point of interest concerning the painting is the ionic column that she inserted in the middle of her open torso. The chiseled and classical column also projects a double meaning: first, Frida's inclination to use art as therapy, secondly, her greatest achievement as an artist, namely to create the aesthetics of anguish and deterioration, which celebrates the pulsation of life under the shadows of endless suffering.

Beneath the Canvas

Today's special blog post will be devoted to the exhibition of Zsuzsi Csiszér, a contemporary painter from Veszprém, which was recently opened in Várfok Gallery. The name of the exhibit, Journals, is an accurate summary of the atmosphere of the works presented, since most of them are the mementos of someone's daily musings and self-analysis in the mirror of the various impacts one encounters during the day. In that spirit, in her huge collages, Csiszér rips open the smooth canvas of reality, and scrutinizes the new associations and parallels between the fragments of tiny details and influences (ads, dreams, imaginary faces and landscapes) this reality is formed by. Using her brush as a scalpel, she drills small tunnels into the surface of things, and creates a new panorama to the chaotic mixture at the bottom of our, personal or collective, unconscious. Although her works are rather intrinsic, Csiszér manages to make a conversation with the outside world as well, because she addresses a number of external events in her pieces: she often uses bits of newspaper headlines and articles as a building material for her art for instance.

One of the artist's recurring motifs is the human face. Her large collages usually depict two or three faces from different angles, putting a great emphasis on the eyes, which have always carried the connotation of seeing the deeper essence of people or everyday phenomena. Still, some of these faces are painted with faint and nacreous colors, which sometimes create an artificial or kitsch-like effect. The paintings remain silent about the question whether this is a conscious and intentional thing from the artist's part, evoking the idealized images that mushroom in the media, or an inadvertent one. In this series, the pictures that portray aging people are way more interesting, since the fragmentary and deteriorating faces of old people resonate very well with the disintegratedness of the form itself.

Although the most impressive works are these collages, Csiszér also featured a number of witty and delicate installations made with different techniques. She grasps the subconscious of the typical female by displaying the same abstract and fractional elements on chopping boards for example. Also, the artist carved out a big papier macher figure solely from newspaper sheets, and made a miniature labyrinth out of tv program guides.
Still, one of the most intriguing objects in the gallery is probably an excerpt from the artist's actual journal, in which she ponders on her ars poetica and most inner feelings and thoughts; however, even here, her most intimate moments are stirred up by the menial happenings of daily life: one of her friends draws a small heart on her sheet of paper, or distracts her by talking to her about irrelevant issues.

Those who are interested in Csiszér Zsuzsi's above mentioned or other artworks can either check out her own blog: http://csiszerzsuzsicsiszer.blogspot.com/ or see the exhibition, which can be visited till 7th May.