NOTES_01 _02 _03 _04

Generally people long for something else and something different than what they have, first of all to be somewhere else. Whenever I work on a given surface of a picture, I often record and take stock of surfaces that I myself cannot decipher, owing to the fact that in the trance-like process of making art, I seem to fall into the picture’s structure, producing movements on the two-dimensional surface that even I myself find irrational. I often intentionally destroy the potential for direct visual understanding by using verbal commentaries, as if to provide explanations for the different stages used in the creative process. Such expressions, however, function as randomised prompts, without a precisely definable function. The pictorial elements come together from different “fragments of reality”, seemingly devoid of any organising principle, pieced together in a comic strip-like manner. Dislocated in this manner from their natural environs (by dismantling existing easel paintings and transforming them into a new structure), through the process of artistic remembrance they transmute the past into the present. This, for me, is not a typical and traditional compulsion, but rather a form of multiple choice, making it possible for me to “superscribe” the visual story as many times as I wish.

A common feature of institutionalised culture and subculture is that they both advocate the perspectival approach as the major fundamental principle behind artistic vision and vision rendering. This approach plays a very important role in the structuring of my paintings, although I do use currently available media tools in the creation of my work. I apply computer designed, edited and printed stickers, or pre-made prints onto the upper layers of my pictures. Here all the basic elements become deposited on top of one another, “re-amplifying”, as it were, the already processed surfaces. This has proved to be a viable method, functioning as a sort of telemetry. As an active participant in the process, I incorporate my decisions, my movements and my responses to various modifications into my work, as well as allowing space for the maintenance of a state called “incompletion” which I uphold till the very last minute.

The audiences are always shocked by the fact that intruding into their perceived ideal world, there is an alien, and for them incomprehensible, visual subculture (to use the thus far chosen terminology). Thus, they naturally attempt to eliminate it as quickly and effectively as possible, using their own devices. I try to expand the elbowroom of this neglected environment, stretching it as far as I can. Through a process of transformation I strive to make these visual elements more comprehensible, in an attempt to form a sympathetic and perceptive audience. I depict everyday situations, in which the strongest emotion is perhaps a sense of despair, which I also try to make the recipient retain – not by providing direct clues, nor by specific instructions, but by delaying the reaction, thus creating a sort of recipient compulsion.

I do not share the vision of those who believe that an easily intelligible realism within art is capable of visualising actual social problems, since complete and perfect perception does not stimulate any activity whatsoever on the recipient’s part. I endeavour to put obstacles in the spectators’ way that can easily be stepped over, thus forcing them into a compulsive activity. This is a conscious technique; I could not live with myself otherwise. My easel paintings seem to evoke the visual world of the Japanese Manga culture. But I only utilise a tiny element from this visual vocabulary within the didactic symbols of my works – the most expressive details of a face: the eyes through which the scale of emotions is the most transparent. Then I distort the biologically normal proportions, thus the eyes function on the pictorial surface as separate structures. They assume gigantic dimensions, yet this disproportionate character, this over-enlargement of the scales of reality, is goal-oriented and functional. It is in this way that every element of the two-dimensional surface can become aligned with the perspective of children, which is egocentric and of a synthesising nature.