VITAL AGONY
Laszlo Gyorffy, Csaba Kis Roka, Gabor Szenteleki, Felix Deac
Curator: Mario Z. Nemes

Against all efforts of contemporary art for dehumanization, it could not successfully close its deal with the problem of human figure. In the same time the naive figurative painting has lost its credit, as the human figure in art does not appear as a predefined and „self-evident” object, but as a phenomenon exposed to constant reinterpretation. The human figure is constantly „in birth”, so the process of painting is not a mimesis, rather a breeding of forms. The „vital agony” concept of Georges Bataille refers to that paradoxal movement, wherein overtaking the anthropocentric forms does not unavoidable mean abolishing the human figures, but reinforcing the work with forms, which is the scene of both destruction and creation. Gyorffy Laszlo, Kis Roka Csaba, Szenteleki Gabor – artists of the so called „horror scene of Budapest ” – do not spread the total suppression of humans, but the carnivalian liberty of the distorted flesh. Each one of the three artists have come from the zone of figurative painting, but the consistent subversion abolished the humanist codes of representing figures. The common question is: what kind of flesh is hiding behind the body? Exceeding the horror-baroque group pictures and dismantling the genre of painting, Kis Roka Csaba reaches the distorted truth of bleeding torsos. This cruel truth marks the vulnerability and miserability of existence, in the same time each torso promises a new form of life, as mutilation is the gesture of creative love in this art. Szenteleki Gabor approaches the human existence from the portrait, as the human face is the royal residence of ethic and character, in the same time flesh has already absorbed body, so finally remains only a „bio-ruin”: a claustrophobic solitude of nostalgia for organs and fragments. But this loneliness is the moment of incubation, that fertile state, in which degeneration is transformed in evolution.  Set of prolific cells in the works of Gyorffy Laszlo are moved by this deformed vitality, the decline of human beings claims for a post apocalyptic anthropology, where life still exists, but world is given up for a long time. The chaotic form of impersonal flesh is not an abstract order, rather a leak of demonic vitality. This phenomenon is suggested by the suicidal-abstract works of the artist, that are humiliating „from inside out” the dream of a visual order – in a self destructing manner. A work of the artist Felix Deac, with its deformed protrudings completes the pictural vision of the „Budapest horror scene” artists, as it marks the recognition that this is not only about rethinking painting as a genre but also about repopulation of post human world. A new creation – over zoo and human park. The exhibition space changes into a laboratory of cultivated forms, where fragments of human body fall into the genesis of an alternative natural history. Though this laboratory is not doctor Frankenstein`s workshop, because he wanted to rebuild the fragments of the mutilated flesh in the form of a human. The vital agony clears off the trauma of humanity, as it tries to liberate life from the dictatorship of human figure to celebrate the counter-revolution of flesh.

Mario Z. Nemes works as a poet, critic and art theorist. He studied philosophy and aesthetics at the philosophical faculty of Eotvos Lorand-University, Budapest/Hungary. He received the cogito award of the Hungarian Association for Philosophy and from the publishing company L’Harmattan. He is co-founder of the poetry group Telep Csoport. In 2013, together with Zsolt Miklosvolgyi and Mark Fridvalszki, he founded the fanzine and small press Technology and the Uncanny in Berlin/Germany. He lives and works in Budapest.