Domonkos Benyovszky-Szűcs | Caelestia Crimina – Celestial Sins
solo exhibition
Benyovszky-Szűcs Domonkos, a visual artist, has an exhibition at the Faur Zsófi Gallery from September 2023, which draws attention to the forms and spread of aestheticized, invisible violence with the tools of art.
Imagine a Hollywood movie in which racist, sexist and violent scenes alternate, without a happy ending - this would hardly happen in today's politically correct world of the film industry, with the regulation of gender and race representation. At the same time, the most popular pornographic content features objectification of the body, depiction of various forms of abuse, which are commonplace and validated, and thus spread globally in a hidden way, within the framework of pornography. But we don't necessarily have to encounter such content to see that our contemporary reality is saturated with violence, and some elements of our visual culture often seem innocent desire-creating, while contributing to the oppressive, power-operating as one of the basic pillars, so that the system constantly reproduces oppression. These phenomena reach us "censored": through the romanticization, aestheticization or eroticization of various forms of violence. The aestheticized and eroticized abuse is the most important product of the porn industry, which is among the world's leading industries, generating several times Hollywood's revenue year after year. This was served historically from the end of the nineties by the cable providers' night-time program time that ensured the widest possible reach in Hungary, which later spread unlimitedly with the spread of the internet; the "designed for couples", feature-like content; or the use of aesthetic codes familiar from art history in porn films, such as complementary colors or carefully designed compositions. Looking back in time, this mode of representation reached one of its peaks in the time of baroque painting, during Rubens' work, who infused a new sensuality into the previous tradition of nude painting, combining the Netherlandish enamel grisaille (black-and-white) painting with Italian pasty color painting. The euphemized sexual violence is also considered one of the defining antecedents of many stories from Greek and Roman mythology painted by Rubens. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, there are more than fifty descriptions of sexual violence, which are mostly referred to as rapture, abduction, romance, love or even marriage in art. We have to realize that the representation of violence made into culture has been part of our visual culture for millennia, just think of the exhibited objects and the stories they depict while walking in picture galleries and sculpture halls.
The exhibition at Faur Zsófi Gallery seeks to answer how sexual violence became invisible and yet sought after, watched and even desired in relation to sexuality. In his latest works Benyovszky-Szűcs Domonkos connects the aesthetics of feature porn films characteristic of the turn of the millennium with the artistic tradition of idealized body, which is rooted mostly in Greek mythology and the depiction of gods. This is also indicated by the title of the exhibition borrowed from Ovid: Caelestia Crimina - Heavenly Sins. Culture and mythology are media that hide, cover up, make inaccessible violence, and pornography-based culture is based on making violence unnoticed and invisible. Its visualization through the works presented at the exhibition is by no means self-serving and equally takes on a hidden form: The excerpts from Ovid's writings appearing on Rubens' transcripts are hidden between layers of paint as an allegory for a message covered by medium drawing attention to abuse hidden under seductive aesthetic surface. As this happens in Latin language characteristic to classical culture it is just as inaccessible and hidden as brutality present at system level in porn.
The exhibition does not seek culprits, does not blame, does not stigmatize, it only draws attention to a widespread and silenced phenomenon with the tools of contemporary visual art. In addition to paintings and risoprints, some works also take up space in the exhibition space in the form of home textiles (towel, decorative pillowcase) as an analogy of the domesticated abuse that surrounds us, even in a purchasable, take-home form. As part of the exhibition, we would like to support the Patent Association, which carries out legal protection, assistance, research and public education activities in the field of violence against women, with a fundraising campaign.
The exhibition can be viewed until September 29 every weekday between 12:00 and 18:00 at the Faur Zsófi Gallery.