INTERLUDIUM - Bertalan Varga

Bertalan Varga’s solo exhibition titled INTERLUDIUM is based on a systematic presentation of two groups of works created over the past three years.

The exhibition titled Please Pay Attention, the Doors Are Closing, presented at Neon Gallery in 2024, provides the material for the composition and formal development of these “barely formed” images was inspired, among other things, by a mundane detail: the practical, rubber-ring-framed, rounded-corner glass panes on the doors and windows of Metro Line 3. “Inspiration” isn’t even the right word: rather, it’s a sudden sense of wonder at a daily sight that has become so familiar—to the point of boredom and invisibility—that you no longer notice it. The essence of the experience is that there are no static forms in and of themselves, and therefore every sight also signifies a journey. The meaning behind the choice of title is more subtle than that; it is linked to William Blake’s famous lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

The images operate with subtle differences in color and sensation, often pushing the boundaries of perceptibility. The artist considers the exhibition’s title to be both ironic and self-ironic, standing in slight contrast to the now ubiquitous, loud and clattering, a visual world that is, by any measure, out of proportion and overflowing.

Another part of the works on display at the exhibition is the series Random Structures, which has been in development since 2013 and a series of “random structures” that has been in the making since 2013 and combines multiple variations. Among them are works depicting bulging, crumpled, and line-network-like images, as well as works that use a brick as a module, varying its dimensions, as well as works featuring triangular and rhombus shapes. While they appear to differ in form, their focus is entirely the same. This formed the backbone of last year’s exhibition titled Stones in the Web.

To quote Bertalan Varga: “The choice of title is the result of complex associations. The nets that create and structure my works are, for me, obvious metaphors for perception. The net is a tool for “capturing” the outside world, yet it is also an archetype of the body’s extension and elongation, from clothing to a spaceship. Stone is also evocative. It relates to the images—which feature triangular shapes created with a chisel—in that these works are characterized by partially bound, their quasi-motion, and their rich potential for variation, resemble the appearance and presumed movement of trilobites (three-lobed primitive crustaceans), which became extinct approximately 252 million years ago, and their presumed movements, right from the very first piece of this kind. In the images that appear more emphatically as nets, however, the stone does not represent a vague sense of lost or latent life, but is painfully concrete, since in these works, the core covered by the canvas is concrete."