Figuration / Non-Figuration
Olseröds Konsthall, Olseröd 2023. Exhibition together with Klara Östlund.
NOTES ON MONOCHROME LANDSCAPES
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) a fashion photographer in London detects murder when developing and enlarging his spontaneous taken photos of a couple in a park. The film illuminates the matter of imagination and reality. When a seemingly insignificant detail is enlarged until it becomes substantial, it compels us to reevaluate the condition of things. Is the non-essential in fact the essential? What is the motif when we discern another image within the image? Questions Gábor Palotai has been contemplating while working on his paintings during the recent years.
Reality has been taken over by a screen-world changing our experience of life. My aim is to capture the most fundamental graphic elements, pixels, and fragments of images from the digital world within which I work and with which I create my world view. Through further developments, enlargements and elaborations, my intention is to transform the disappearing mental images into tangible matter of memory, as evidence of what I have seen and what I see.
Memory itself is an inner landscape that unfolds and spreads out in front of our eyes.
And of everything we have seen, movies, books, the whole of art history, of all the travels we have made and all the places we visited, remains fragments of remembrance.
Like a pentimento which fore- and background, the seen and the hidden, constantly change places, in the blink of an eye.
Every brush stroke I painted by hand over the reliefs within the paintings, hides and highlights at the same time.
The paintings turn the patterns of the reliefs into something else. Transformed, the motifs become more and more remote from their origin, which already from the beginning was obscure. We are left with allegorical paintings, and as such we can discover things in them that maybe was not even there from the beginning. The monochrome landscapes have no frames and are without distinct borders. Furthermore, if you look long enough a contras color is seen beside each painting. Another image emerges. Perhaps it is the other image which is the real one? Gábor Palotai leaves that question open for you to answer.
Linda Rampell
Olseröds Konsthall, Olseröd 2023. Exhibition together with Klara Östlund.
NOTES ON MONOCHROME LANDSCAPES
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) a fashion photographer in London detects murder when developing and enlarging his spontaneous taken photos of a couple in a park. The film illuminates the matter of imagination and reality. When a seemingly insignificant detail is enlarged until it becomes substantial, it compels us to reevaluate the condition of things. Is the non-essential in fact the essential? What is the motif when we discern another image within the image? Questions Gábor Palotai has been contemplating while working on his paintings during the recent years.
Reality has been taken over by a screen-world changing our experience of life. My aim is to capture the most fundamental graphic elements, pixels, and fragments of images from the digital world within which I work and with which I create my world view. Through further developments, enlargements and elaborations, my intention is to transform the disappearing mental images into tangible matter of memory, as evidence of what I have seen and what I see.
Memory itself is an inner landscape that unfolds and spreads out in front of our eyes.
And of everything we have seen, movies, books, the whole of art history, of all the travels we have made and all the places we visited, remains fragments of remembrance.
Like a pentimento which fore- and background, the seen and the hidden, constantly change places, in the blink of an eye.
Every brush stroke I painted by hand over the reliefs within the paintings, hides and highlights at the same time.
The paintings turn the patterns of the reliefs into something else. Transformed, the motifs become more and more remote from their origin, which already from the beginning was obscure. We are left with allegorical paintings, and as such we can discover things in them that maybe was not even there from the beginning. The monochrome landscapes have no frames and are without distinct borders. Furthermore, if you look long enough a contras color is seen beside each painting. Another image emerges. Perhaps it is the other image which is the real one? Gábor Palotai leaves that question open for you to answer.
Linda Rampell