Csaba Nemes. Experiment for Catching Up
Mittwoch, 02. April 2014 - 19:00 Uhr
Galerie Knoll
"Some years ago, I have started to work on my painting series „Father’s Name: Csaba Nemes” which is based on my father’s amateur photographs. After a few years following his private documentary I realized that I’m not only interested in his nice grayish photos, but more and more in the connections between the previous and the recent regime. More often I took my own photos and I adjusted the context or I combined them with some of my father’s pieces. Meanwhile the style of the paintings has changed, there are more often colors and less photorealistic references. Sometimes I use different photographical sources in one paintings to create a sort of montage. For a while there was a very remarkable common element in the works which shows their belonging to the series: They are all squares. The square is a very strong and in a way arrogant format which can suggest a kind of assertion. In my very recent paintings I skipped this strong visual form which means that they are not essentially/necessarily part of the „Father’s Name” series any more.
Every painting has its own story but it doesn’t mean that one can read them as a novel. It is more that the paintings try to build up a visual construction full with political elements and visual references of different social movements.
For example Day to Day depicts a demolished monument which can represent the permanent reinterpretations of our historical past. The pure base of the monument can be seen as a skeleton of the sculpture. In the backround of the painting there are some typical buildings of Budapest and some people around the contrustion who seemed to be lonely and definitely out of the context.
The other example is Seemed To Be a Stable Balace. The image is dominated by a central perspective view of a street and in the middle there is a figure who tries to balance two paperboxes. He stays like an actor on the stage and his movement - as he holds the empty boxes - is a bit ironic because the weight of the boxes can’t be heavy. In the backround there are other figures but they are not part of the play. The buildings around are a bit raunchy and the atmosphare is not funny at all. The situation can be a metaphor or a model of the never ending difficulties which cause the endless feeling of suffering for the Eastern European people. These people did a lot in the last two decades to catch up on their dreams. As a member of the Eastern European community I feel free to express the Experiment for Catching Up in an ironic or self ironic way.“