February 24 - April 28, 2012

BAZIS
contemporary art space
F.D.P. - Fabrica de Pensule, 59-61 H. Barbusse st., 1st floor
Cluj Napoca

OBJET
artist: Zsolt BERSZAN

The very essence of Berszan Zsolt’s artworks consist of a reductionist visual thinking. In his personal exhibitions from the previous years, Berszan employed Malevich’s gesture through the dominant use of black and the idea of splitting the world into four primary colours, in which black stands for materiality, finitude. Bearing this concept in mind, the starting point of the present exhibition is the depiction of finitude: in the two large drawings we are confronted with black joined surfaces. But the black comes in a light colour framework. The dark matter of the material world is adjoined with the infinity, it unfolds to an indeterminable and imperceptible space, which – in these circumstances – is to be perceived as the other side of human life. The hidden lights lying on the drawings’ surface reveal shapes almost homogenous with the black, certain prominences of the other world.
The two drawings are placed one in front the other, framing an object of a really unidentifiable nature: a deformed matter lying on the floor, the very look of shapeless matter. The past black artworks of Berszan’s – made of silicone, metal or concrete – all reflected the very meaning of extinction, of cease. In this case, the shapeless concrete block, through its insignificant grey, is depriving us of the possibility to assign a certain meaning. Stuck in between the given „mise en scene” that emphasizes even more the bleakness of the room, the grey block becomes an „object” denying its status, the one of an object. In reality it ceases to be a body, it can not longer be called an object, but only an ’objet’- staring out from the remains of life. ’Objet’ in Julia Kristeva’s definition. In the French philosopher’s essay, called ”Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection”, ‘objet’ represents an objectless object, identifiable – as rejection – by a self, who is disrespectfully considering his/her self, his/her materiality, his/her extinction. ’Objet’ may be a tuft of hair, a suppurating wound, or the corpse itself – as the remains of life, of the body. Berszan’s concrete block lies down the floor as the expression of the eternal rest. There’s nothing but a concrete block that undresses itself of any sculptural shape: seen from above seems to be a tridimensional painting, a „tridimensional canvas” painted with savage gestures. On the surface of this concrete block, created with a brute force, some different nuances are alternating, building an undefined composition, bearing no meaning. As if we would look into a coffin, where the corpse is unrecognizable and the death is devoid of motherland.
           
Gerda Széplaky
philosopher – aesthetician
Budapest