Róbert Batykó
About the artist
Hungarian painter Róbert Batytkó (b. 1981) has built one of the most remarkably consistent oeuvres in a span of a decade. He made a name for himself in the middle of the 2000s with instrument-, and machine-portraits in which he uniquely mixed aspects of minimalism, photorealism and the technique of the stencil coming from his interest in street art as a teenager.
His painting program built on visual decontextualisation of photographs came to it’s full bloom very early in his career. He has been consciously playing with images which become more and more abstract visual enigmas on his canvases.
Recently the orientation of Batykó has clearly shifted towards the poetic aspects of the errors of digital encoding and the painterly potentials of the by-products of digital image processing. He also created a new signature painting technique: he is scraping and smearing the undried paint across the canvas by a custom built machine. With this impersonal but still unreproducible gesture he is reflecting also on the fundamental questions of post-digital painting, by creating his interpretation of the image-flow of our digital epoch. In his new works Batykó flashes also the haunting subconscious of the manipulation and technological transformability of images in an unfamiliar, yet familiar way, which is constantly redefining the boundaries of abstraction and figurative art.
