X-ray Images of the Psyche – Ákos Bánki | Lightfishing – A Show by Gyula Július | Fear in a Black Box – A Group Exhibition | Alien Proximity – A Show by H. Luxbacher and H. Godez
REVIEW:
Katalin Kopin: X-ray Images of the Psyche – Ákos Bánki
Reddish networks of neurons, naked circuits of the brain, X-ray images of the psyche projected onto canvasses: intellectual finds from the borderland of Tachisme, Informel, Abstract Expressionism, and Calligraphic Abstraction. The winner of the Barcsay Prize this year is Ákos Bánki.
One senses at first sight that space for these pictures is insufficient; these intermittent canvasses painted over with throbbing tones of red and blue should be hung in infinitely winding, windowless, underground passages lit by cold, vibrating neon tubes, far away from the Sun, natural light, and fresh air. Rather than a victorious feat of joyful painting, Bánki’s art is a brutally sincere tour of our psyche utterly without embellishments.
The streams of paint thrown at the canvasses generate energy and tension. When we look into ourselves, it is not necessarily beautiful things we come up against; nor do we find an aesthetic of spotless, seamless beauty here.
Ákos Bánki’s painting is a walk on the tight rope connecting Pollock’s agitated system of lines with the undulating calligraphies of Dezső Korniss. The streams of paint run along beds set by gestures of emotion and passion. As Pollock, the alcoholic enfant terrible of American Abstract Expressionism would say, a modern artist expresses an interior world of energy, the motion of interior forces. Continuing along his predecessor’s path, Ákos Bánki draws heavily also on Korniss’ intellectual calligraphies brought forth by the Hungarian master’s interior emigration; an indebtedness defying a lapse of almost 60 years. There can be no doubt that Korniss’ elegantly undulating systems of lines belong to the same intellectual sphere as Bánki’s diversified, pulsating line system.
Ákos Bánki graduated from the Academy of Art in 2006 as a pupil of Sándor Molnár and Orsolya Drozdik. He then became the assistant of aged master Tamás Lossonczy. He had long been preoccupied with projections of various mechanisms of the human psyche. In 2009, at the Art Factory Gallery he co-produced (with Ágnes Verebics) a performance project involving a virtual boxing bout that was to channel their respective tensions and passions.
Already at his graduation show he had presented clusters of drained and splurged lines, pictures he later named the Psychic Space series. His series called Psychic Flowers, too, had degenerating, liquid „psychic spaces” as its theme rather than silky, refined petals of flowers. His series called Dionysean Dream revels in a tightly-knit colour texture of abstract patterns.
If we are not afraid of the naked reality of our well-hidden emotions splurging right into our face, seeing the show is a must, but only by ourselves since confrontation and meditation are by definition solitary exercises. The invitation card to the show should read: „Free your emotions! Come to a training of mental hygiene and self-therapy!” Have fun!
Jenő Barcsay Collection (Ferenczy Museum), Szentendre
14 January –
PREVIEWS:
Lightfishing – A Show by Gyula Július
17 January – 13 March
Raiffeisen Gallery
The venue of the action of media artist Gyula Július is Krapanj in Dalmatia. The title of the photographic project: Spinning Fish. Lit by an ultra-violet beam and flashlight a fish strung on a transparent fishing line rotates with lightning speed. The photographs are both eerie and absurd what with the interplay of light effects and ultra-precise exposures. Some of the photographs record the rotation of other, unidentified, fluorescent bodies evoking cosmological associations of two black holes throwing extragalactic beams of matter at each other.
Fear in a Black Box – A Group Exhibition
11 January – 27 February
Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts
Fear is acquiring a growing presence in the mass media. But how can we make a difference between our justified fears from those merely generated by the media? The show is attempting to explore the origins, effects, and growing influence of fear through the language of movies. Most of the samples come from a 2010 festival at Werkleitz, but the interplay of the present exhibition space with movie projection is also examined. The „black box” is indeed dark, but not necessarily fearsome. The show invites spectators to re-examine their present social, political, and existential conditions without generating fear itself.
Alien Proximity – A Show by H. Luxbacher and H. Godez
14 January – 12 February
Szombathely Gallery
Austrian artists Heimo Luxbacher (aka „The Hermit”) and H. Godez present works focussing upon human connections and interventions breaching traditional structures and procedures. The large-size paintings and sculptures together with some smaller paperworks offer an insight into largely unknown territory. Luxbacher explores the abstraction of opposing relations using widely varying techniques and materials. Godes mixes his themes with gestures and movements steeped in true-to-life sentimentality; insisting on figurative painting, he has recently produced portraits from wide-ranging cultural spaces.