online exhibition @soloshow | curated by @greedy_rigor, @rhizomeparkinggarage
photo: Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss @ art quarter budapest / thanks to: Máté Janky

A mysterious hand writes unknown words on the wall: "You have been weighed, and found wanting." The prophet deciphers it, the king falls (1). An angel's hand touches a warrior's hip, and it jumps from its socket – yet its owner receives a victor's name (2). Man is defeated / man is raised. Reality-check.

The medium is the material itself: glossy black enamel paint (3), which moves out from its support surface and, cross-linking, draws out the narrative. At the center of this spiderweb-like weave, a religious image got stuck: a cheap aluminium copy of a Theotokos, evoking the riza-casing of a Byzantine icon. The object and the paint are subjected to a trial by pressure (4): the gesture of pointing forces the material through the empty silhouettes of the figures. The result is a dense, root-like paint outgrowth – "manually 3D-printed" – which, at the point of entry, still takes on the outline of the saints (religious framing), only to cluster into a depersonalized, organic form. On the floor it finally lies sprawled out as spilled mass, off its leash (the medium is free).

Notes

(1) A hand writes on the wall at Belshazzar's feast: "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin." Daniel: "Tekel – weighed, and found wanting." The king is killed that night. (Daniel 5)

(2) Jacob wrestles a "man" until daybreak at the Jabbok. His hip is struck and dislocated; he won't let go until blessed. He receives the name Israel: "you have striven with God and men, and prevailed." (Genesis 32:24–32)

(3) BLAEK – Old English word for quality black, versus SWART, the weak, matte black. Lőrinc Borsos uses it for the glossy enamel paint, an industrial standard that both absorbs and reflects light.

(4) János Pilinszky, radio interview, 1979: "A piece of plastic – a ruined washbasin – is just as sacred as the Evening Star. [...] Plastic must be made more plastic, until it cries, and under the ordeal's weight lets out a scream like the martyrs'."