BAZIS contemporary art sapce Berlin
Moordorfstrasse 7-9, Berlin
 
MUTATIONS
 

Zsolt BERSZAN
Istvan BETUKER
Dan MACIUCA
Szabolcs VERES

 
 
 

 

The artist is not a creator of the culture, Gottfried Benn has noted, but a mutant who's affronting the rationale and humanist system of culture. Zsolt Berszán's, Dan Măciucă's,  Szabolcs Veres' and István Betuker's exhibition represents o provocative statement in this regard, considering the aim of the artworks the one of artistic “irritation” towards the humanistic apprehension in representing the human body. Within this framework, the artwork symbolizes not just a conceptual exercise or retina's interpretation, but also the revealing of a sensuality in which the cultural existence hallmarks and altogether the primary ones are organically melted.
Zsolt Berszán's graphite drawings seem to go be in line with the tradition of the abstraction voided by human characteristics, but, these dehumanized visual contexts bear in themselves some human sensuality touches, in the form of visual-anthropological “residua”, as if they would try to reenact the human life after a cataclysm.
Dan Măciucă's artwork, the texture of the painting seem to absorb, to “capture” the human expression and the human universe, but the massive paint layers put the viewer into difficulty to decode the visual scene, though the scope would not be an exhaustive refusal of the meanings, but the revealing of the inner tension between abstract art and figurative art.
Szabolcs Veres' artworks appeal to some similar dehumanization solutions, in the front stage discclosing visual distortions and creative mutations of the human body, though these gestures don't just expose the destruction, they are more a fact of recognition: in the heart of our culture, the aesthetics of ugliness is able to initiate a reformation process of the contemporary thinking on human body, and could therefore set the basis of new forms of the post-human existence.
István Betuker could be considered as the most “emotional” of the four artists, mostly because its artworks are the ones that preserve most clearly the volatile traces of the humanity. Though, the viewer cannot be captured into this perspective that is far from being harmonious, because the human figure, most of the times, is nothing but fragments and/or distorted appearance. In the same time, one can observe a certain perplexity of the artist, which, in the end confers a dramatic atmosphere to the paintings.
The entire exhibition would be defined by the dramatic atmosphere the resides in the artworks, mostly because the poetics of “irritation” of these artworks does not meet the set aesthetic-ideological program, but a recognition between the daily confrontation of the artistic practice and the human existence, the very feeling of a live mutant, which can be able to perceive the human culture only through experiencing the alterity, the otherness.

Nemes Z. Mario, philisopher (Budapest)

 
 
Photo & video: Dalma NYIRI