The exhibition Fusion is a longcherished wish and a tribute to Barna Benedek, whom I consider one of the most significant concrete constructive artists of the present time. Barna Benedek’s body of work has a special meaning for me because he does not imitate reality, but instead shows unknown and unexplored facets of the world. To achieve this, Barna expands spatial situations with the help of visual vibrations and oscillations. Thereby he generates cognitive and emotional resonances between the work and the viewer.

Barna does not reproduce a certain reality, he does not compare or refer to another reality through allusions or allegories, but he reveals a completely new reality and its transformation, which in turn makes his work unique and authentic. Unlike the surrealists, whose aim was to depict something dreamlike, unconscious, absurd and fantastic, Barna Benedek does not address the subconscious but directly the sensory perception, he does not intoxicate the creative mind but awakens and sobers it up by revealing the mechanisms of reality. 

The exhibition combines two important series of artworks from different creative periods. It is a sy­nopsis of old and new paintings and objects. Since the beginning of his creative work, Barna has been obsessively concerned with the principle of order as well as with capturing light on an image carrier. In his latest works he goes further and fuses the 3rd dimension with the two-dimensional depiction. In this way he succeeds in combining different levels of reality in one and the same representation. At the same time, he reflects the optical illusion in the real spatial object and opens the topic of the ambivalence of different levels of illusion. Closeness and distance, light and shadow, stillness and vibration, progression and degression, concentration and re- laxation, reality and illusion, etc. are characteristic for his work. Just as life sometimes requires a new consciousness or an update of the world view, which is only made possible by withdrawal and dis- tance, Barna Benedek‘s works require a dynamic way of looking at things and reveal themselves in the process of physical approach as well as distancing. Consequently his artworks gain autonomy and self-existence of the depiction, which enables Barna Benedek‘s precise compositions to come to life.

 

Xenia Petrischenko
M.A. International Arts Management

XP · ART AGENCY

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