Szabolcs Szolnoki | Aura

solo exhibition

Szabolcs Szolnoki's paintings guide the viewer into a world where they can explore the boundary between dream and wakefulness. The living characters in the paintings—humans, animals, and plants—gently fade into mist or gradually merge with the physical environment, often leaving only their aura behind. The concept of transience is strongly influential in the artist's works. His paintings frame liminal spaces that are permeable, imbued with meaning and powerful emotional impact, while simultaneously being both unfamiliar and familiar. This duality makes them both ominous and comforting, alluring. The stretched moment of existence on the edge of wakefulness and dream becomes constant, rendering colors hazy and mist-like. Human presence is hinted at only by indistinct body parts, clothes, and objects. Human existence does not define the liminality, thus their appearance in the images does not become significant, merely one of the impressions of surrealism. The hallucination-like illusions resemble apparitions, with reality becoming ambiguous, and perception turning uncertain. What remains is groping, clinging to recollection, and reaching back to memories, which also abandon the viewer in this atmospheric maze. Viewing Szolnoki's paintings places us in a state of transit, where it becomes questionable whether we are in the imagined spaces of wakefulness, half-sleep, or dream: the sensation of a lack of specific place becomes dominant.

Szolnoki's art is permeated by contrasts. However, these contrasts do not clash but are able to interact harmoniously. His canvases display a fusion of real and imagined, abstract and figurative, living and constructed elements. While his earlier works were defined by dark, somber shades, his current exhibition showcases Szabolcs Szolnoki's unique world in a new light, building the multi-layered meanings of his paintings with vibrant colors.