ARTPORTAL’S WEEKLY ARTGUIDE – March 16, 2011-artguide

Travellers: Miklós Szüts and Sebald | Zoltán Ádám: New Works | Paper Panorama – A Group Exhibition | Outpost – Critical Space – A Show by Gyula Domián, Péter Tamás Halász, Ádám Kokesch, Pavla Sceranková, and Tomáą Dľadoň | REAL – A Spanish Landscape with a Monarch – A Show by András Dániel | At One Breath – The Fragility of the Human Condition – A Show by Bazil Duliskovich

REVIEW:

Alexa Csizmadia: Travellers: Miklós Szüts and Sebald

With their restrained colours, Miklós Szüts’ watercolours are perfect visual paraphrases of the prose written by the great melancholic W. G. M. Sebald. As J. L. Borges had written, everybody creates his/her own predecessors. This time, Szüts places his stepping stones alongside Sebald, a writer cited more and more often by today’s critics and artists. He has become a central figure probably because, once we sidestep his postmodern output, he leads us back to the great humanists of the 20th century.

Sebald is an author who employs the powerful metaphor of travel very often; also, his writing presents unusually generous helpings of visuality. His maze-like writings are often interspersed with greyish photographs (purchased from antique-dealers) siginifying an effort to mingle fiction with reality.  
In his watercolours, Szüts brings forth the meditative tone of Sebald’s travels, a tone immersed in a Central-European mood of homelessness and a longing for a home. With Szüts as with Sebald, the borderline between fact and fiction remains blurred. It is very often that Szüts employs photographs as a point of departure for his pictures. If we accept a photograph to be the crystallisation of a given moment to be placed into a collection, rather like a stag-beetle is pinned up along many other beetles, a painting, in contrast, tends to widen and enliven a given moment by making it universal rather than freezing it once and for all.
Should this interpretation hold true, Szüts’ exhibit is a painterly elaboration on Sebald’s oeuvre rather than mere homage to his person.

Bartók ”32 Gallery
22 February – 12 March

PREVIEWS:

Zoltán Ádám: New Works
10 March – 8 April
acb Contemporary Arts Gallery
Ádám Zoltán’s new works cater a number of surprises for those familiar with his output thus far. All of them take their inspiration from settings and moods placed far away from the artist’s habitual environment. His weekly commuting between Budapest and Pécs (the venue of his educational activities), and a recent stay at the artists’ summer camp in Pálfa have mercifully torn him out of the atmosphere of Budapest which had become depressing to Ádám lately. What has emerged is several series of fresh, momentous works with forms and colours radiating a high degree of freedom and lightness. Alongside the paintings, the show offers the photo-documentation of Ádám’s recent mural works, some graphic art, and also an installation produced specifically for the present venue.

Paper Panorama – A Group Exhibition
10 March – 30 April
Judit Virág Gallery
Paper works have regained their rightful place in the visual arts, appearing as they do as full-fledged works rather than mere sketches of works in artists’ oeuvres. The many facets of paper can be traced in gestures and geometrical abstraction as well as figurative, conceptual, or even plastic works. Starting from the 70s, the show also offers works from the present day in an effort to prove that paper works deserve a high placement in contemporary art.

Outpost – Critical Space – A Show by Gyula Domián, Péter Tamás Halász, Ádám Kokesch, Pavla Sceranková, and Tomáą Dľadoň
9 March – 23 April
Trafó House of Contemporary Arts
The show examines our common locality as anti-utopia. Often emerging as fictitious, an East-Central-European identity is inevitably provincial in nature. However, it has its local foundations. The region’s „DIY culture” with its home-made appliances and „garage-aesthetics” can be regarded as a usable visual parlance today even though it had been treated as a lowly bogus phenomenon for a long time. The tone of this parlance can be said to be both Romantic and humanistic.

REAL – A Spanish Landscape with a Monarch – A Show by András Dániel
9 March – 9 April
Godot Gallery
With his new works done over the last two years, András Dániel puts forward something completely new. He has been inspired by the Escorial and its master, King Philip II. His technique, too, is entirely unusual since besides his painted wooden panels he also showcases graphic works that place varying planes into varying spaces separated by small pieces of glass. Through retrieving fragments of motifs belonging to a solid period of art history, these works also tell us a lot about the ironic, ambivalent relationships of reality and imagination, sign and meaning, work and artist.

At One Breath – The Fragility of the Human Condition – A Show by Bazil Duliskovich
9 March –
Zsófi Faur’s Ráday Gallery
Bazil Duliskovich fills the traditional genres of portrait or landscape painting with new meanings, turning classical symbols into his own symbols by placing them into new contexts. While his painting is attractive, its philosophy is hard to decipher. Still, the quiet wisdom and the refined and mature form-giving of his new works make for much pleasure.