Róbert Batykó
About the artist
Batykó (b. 1981) throughout his career flashes the haunting subconscious of the manipulation and technological transformability of images in unfamiliar yet familiar, abstract yet figurative form. By reactivating the flow of images through the various stages of transfer in his creative process, he repositions his painting in the age of digital images by delving into the categories of performativity, temporality and participation beyond the painterly problems of representation and abstraction.
Batykó has oscillated his painting program between abstraction and figuration in the past 20 years, his newest works are the latest step in his career-long hybrid process. The new paintings continue the increasingly playfull figurativeness of Batykó’s works and these articulate a new shift after half-a- decade long digital inspirations. The artist already turned back to analogue, tangible materials and motifs in his works on paper, which already required a different compositional approach than the specially scraped paintings before. The new works also reflect on the hypnotic visual power of consumer culture, which is the other main driving force behind the general aspect of Batykó’s art. The new pieces also reconnect to earlier series, and can be associated with Róbert Batykó’s 2015–2016 series of packaging materials and in some aspect recall the artist’s earlier paintings thematizing trash, which he painted during his earlier stays in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2014.
