Solstitium | group exhibition

opening

In the catalog of the 2007 exhibition The Time of Painting, Gábor Reider writes that "the tradition of figurative in twentieth-century Western painting - regardless of the anti-representational agendas of radical neo-avant-garde isms - has never been broken." An example of this is the group exhibition at the Zsófi Faur Gallery, which brings together  figurative pictorial practices and strategies of five artists.

In Alfredo Barsuglia's film stills, which seem deliberately unfinished, it is up to the viewer to weave a narrative around the image. As the title (Rehearsal for a Scene) suggests, the characters in these paintings, which evoke cinematic associations, are participants in an audition. The subject of the painting is a scene in which a supposed director instructs a presumed actor or amateur performer. During (before) the making of the painting, the artist himself grabs a camera to take the photographs: the 'scene' 'visible' on the canvas thus reproduces, evokes, and copies the situation chosen as the subject of the painting. Model and painter are no longer in the same space, and Barsuglia tries to compose and montage the character based on photographs taken from different settings. Although the exhibition presents portraits that flirt with photorealism and seem to be classical, Alfredo Barsuglia's artistic practice is not (exclusively) painterly: the artist, who also produces participatory, new types of public art projects, does not think in terms of images, but in terms of installations, which may also be paintings.

Gábor Lajta's works, which balance the border between figurality and abstraction, confirm his statement from 2006 that "All realist pictures are abstract, but no abstract picture is realistic." The works, which demonstrate an undeniable manual skill, are structured by light and its path. Deliberately fluid, layered, and richly colored, his paintings, akin to Csernus' and Konkoly's practice, are dynamic in their surface-forming rhythm of brushstrokes; while clearly not action painting, the brushstrokes aren't just imprints of conceptual considerations, but also imprints of the painter's movements and his body. The surface dynamism is tempered by the pictorial balance created by the complementaries. His painting, Glimpse would deserve a separate study - a collision of the classical chiaroscuro style of painting, reminiscent of Caravaggio, George de la Tour, and Rembrandt, with abstract expressionist techniques. The collision is striking: the intense veil of red and purple colors, torn apart by the classical scene with the lamplight - undoubtedly the piéce de résistance, almost puncturing the canvas. The figures are concentrated in the central strip of the picture, observing something, but the narrative cannot be deciphered here either, and the viewer is gripped by a feeling of unease, similar to Borremans' paintings. It is difficult to decide whether the purplish-red surface is a door to another room (world) or whether it is covering another image - in the latter case, one might think of a gesture of voluntary image destruction.

In József Szurcsik's work, "the face is the bearer of personality, the man who has lost his face is the mass man deprived of personality. The man with a face has no personality and can therefore be controlled and manipulated, but can also be dangerous. Szurcsik's art warns of these dangers." (Katalin Nagy T.) The faces of József Szurcsik's signature block-headed figures are seemingly poised - a suffocating, or rather, a suffocated calm, as their hands clench into fists. They hover in a desolate, godless, colorless landscape as if caught between two ages, the previous world having collapsed, the next not yet here. They have no language, no identity, and the burden of building the next world on their shoulders. With their pharisaical faces, they look both to the past and the future but see nothing promising on either side. They drown their sorrows in an irrational rigor that can only be directed towards themselves. Power has eaten its children and then turned on itself. The triangle closes, and men throw their axes into each other's head.

The exhibited paintings of György Jovián reflect an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world state, a bitter vision. The paintings are mostly based on photographs mounted on each other and then drawn over; an"original" is thus produced, which is enlarged by the painter - this explains the grid-like arrangement of dots covering the image. The plane of dots is wedged between the viewer's eye and the image, both to create distance and to guide the eye and focus attention. The seemingly peripheral subject is coupled with photorealistic precision: this stark, consistent realism, this fidelity to the truth of reality, is evident in the work of György Jovián. The improbably colorful anti-still lives are serious and gloomy; the heap of rubbish promises nothing good. A pile of disemboweled machines, metal sheets, and bearings, vegetating in a remote part of the world, deemed worthless, can be seen as a spontaneous, temporary monument to our post-industrial society.

The dark visions, the pastose brushwork that brings plasticity, are dissolved by Eveline Kusnyár's airy, childlike, innocent canvases. Painted from the perspective of a frog, or rather a rabbit, the pictures are inspired by a world of their own, teetering on the narrow border between dream and reality, childhood and adulthood. It is as if a dream world unfolding during the afternoon slumber of children in striped overalls and pajamas projected onto the walls: concrete and imaginary elements, objects, and scenes flow from image to image. The imagery is thus similar to the arbitrary nature of play and storytelling in terms of the boundaries of reality - where coral-colored (though not plaid-eared) rabbits fly in the sky, there can be no harm done.