The Essences of Reality, Hungarian and Romanian contemporary artists in an itinerant exhibition

The Essences of Reality,
Hungarian and Romanian contemporary artists in an itinerant exhibition

The Essences of Reality panorama

October 2012

Opening:
Várfok Gallery Budapest
H-1012 várfok st 11.
Thursday October 25, 2012 | Between 7 and 9 p.m.

The exhibition is open:
Between 26.10 – 24.11.2012, from Tuesday to Saturday between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Hungarian artists: Győrffy László | Herman Levente | Misetics Mátyás
Romanian artists: Radu Belcin | Francisc Chiuariu | Flavia Pitiş | Bogdan Raţa

Curators: Borbála Kálmán, Cosmin Năsui

© texts: Várfok Gallery, Năsui Private Collection & Gallery

The next exhibition opening in Várfok Gallery is the result of the cooperation of Várfok Gallery (H) and Năsui Private Collection & Gallery (RO), presenting Hungarian and Romanian artists together along a definite conception around essential approaches of reality. The Budapest exhibition shall be the start of an international project series involving all together three countries in the end: The Essences of Reality is meant to become a travelling exhibition next presented in 2013 in Romania (Bucharest) to then grow even bigger with the cooperation of Polish artists; the group show would respectively be presented in this country too.

Curatorial concept

Essence, essential, that is also substantial: how does one sense reality? Of reality’s innumerous layers, how many is one capable of interpreting, and are we talking at all about several layers of reality or is there only one to handle and to see across? Of the uncountable happenings taking place collaterally in reality, how many does one understand, how many does one influence with his actions? In the least, how can we even outline what is reality?

Answers, interpretations, attitudes, suspicions evolve on the art works presented by the exhibition: interestingly, as a result of this ’questioning’ phase, ’nothingness’ appears as a leitmotiv, often as a contrast to ’existence’, to the essence. This appetite for reality and realism is strong in Eastern European countries’ artworks. The visual, or perhaps more precisely ’technical’ transplantation of these notions actuates the artists to formulate very different approaches, however the role of ’light’, shall it be considered in its physical or theoretical reality or through the extent of its relation to ’dark’, becomes a common denominator of the works.

Another common denominator evolving through the topic is that the exhibition, displaying Hungarian and Romanian artists of a younger generation, shows works which are interlaced with

thoughts related to the artists’ past and identity. It is an East European cultural transection (meant to grow even wider in the near future) which unfolds in front of the viewer who is invited to wander in it and unravel the various essences of reality.

Artists

The determinative element of Radu Belcin’s (1978, Brasov / RO) paintings is the game of lights and shadows, i.e. chiaroscuro in which he places figures and objects giving them a new signification. The identity of his characters having neither faces nor personalities remains an enigma, and it is by researching these that the artist defines the new confines of present and reality.

The newest series of Francisc Chiuariu (1966, Sibiu / RO) catches within the common collective space the individual captured by his every days, his daily ’hurries’ and how in return the individual ’consumes’ this space around him. The painter will use typographic ink and oil painting on backlit to decompose reality hence analysing the postmodern process of the individual’s disintegration within collective life.

Human body can never be missing of László Győrffy’s (1976, Budapest / H) works: these usually depict mutant body parts living an independent life which reflect – placed in grotesque scenes – on human and on themselves, often making public their highly facetious inner life. The self-digesting, putrefying heads represent one of Győrffy’s layers of reality while the body parts levitating in ’nothingness’ and the ’suicidal’ artworks question our existence and its meaning.

The motives determinating some of Levente Herman’s (1976, Tārgu Mureş / RO) series – looking back at the recent œuvre – trace out a kind of personal iconography. His works do not aspire to a ’realistic representation of reality’, but offer another world impregnated with memories kept of reality. If his characters do take a human shape, one will just meet clothes hovering like ghosts which personality and presence confronts us with an inevitable force while the monochrome-like surfaces and silky nuances enlighten the essence.

A basic element of Mátyás Misetics’ (1982, Budapest / H) photographs is light, artificial light. His works depart from the dark, and only the sources defined by the artist will emphasize the figures and the scenes. The alienation of man and the quality of his relations are recurrent topics in his works, but his œuvre mainly experiments the new possibilities of modelling with light – ’photo-graphing’ – to reveal new layers of reality by enlightening it in unusual ways.

The paintings of Flavia Pitiş (1978, Făgăraş / RO) do not depict reality but aim to transplant to the present what is missing of reality. Pitiş usually represents her subjects isolated, hence confronting them with their solitude. Darkness can be interpreted in her works as the equivalent of the immaterial, while her sensitive tracing foreshadows something indefinable, suggests a mysterious presence. Quietude, soft moves emanate from the works which search for the identity of a future generation.

Bogdan Raţa (1984, Nagybánya / RO) explores an innovative posthumanist area with the help of genetic forms taken out of human anatomy. Raţa recreates and multiplies these parts by offering them new lives in new ’bodies’ which seem to be the results of laboratory experiments. The industrial elaboration of his sculptures refers to contemporary infirmity, i.e. the fading of the individual (and personality) but the colourful surfaces also presume the recent use of the body as a toy-like object.

These approaches and tendencies become a sort of key to understand some of the essential matters of our reality and the sometimes-whispering, sometimes-exclamatory or derisory voices invite the viewer to explore new layers by discovering and understanding unusual pictorial compositions.

Contacts

Borbála Kálmán
art historian
Tel: (+36 1)213 5155
[email protected]
www.varfok-galeria.hu

Cosmin Nasui
Artist representative // Art investment consultant // Curator
Tel: (+40) 0371 185 729
[email protected]
www.cosminnasui.com