Despite his young age, Róbert Batykó’s artistic career has been accompanied by such acknowledgements as the Strabag Artaward, the Leopold Bloom Art Award, and a nomination for the AVIVA Award. The individual character of his art revealed itself from the onset of his career, drawing on Pop Art, street art, graffiti art, photorealism and montage in his unique approach to hard-edge painting. Although his works are based on images from our daily lives, owing to the unusual crops and surfaces of different pictorial techniques within the same painting, Batykó’s paintings can best be characterized as abstract.

At acb Attachment’s latest exhibition, Róbert Batykó presents his most recent series, painted in Germany in the summer of 2015. The point of departure for the paintings was the packaging of various products: unfolded boxes decorated with vivid color fields and abstract patterns. Batykó is drawn to this subject primarily because of its visual aspects; structured with folds and perforations, the mostly geometrically patterned, “flattened” paper boxes allow him to experiment with a novel approach to hard-edge painting in terms of both attitude and technique.  Batykó partly returns to the reduced formal devices of his first series (tapes, logos), and simultaneously he effectuates a technical reduction: he breaks with the multi-layered surface consisting of various pictorial structures, and instead, he works with a thin, single coat of paint, sometimes burnished, resulting in a print-like effect.

The series of paintings he began in the autumn of 2014, depicting the minimalist, functional design and sings on the back doors of trucks, also reflecting on the historical traditions of geometric abstraction, can be considered an antecedent of his latest works. The closed door, like the surface of the box in the present series, is a plane that shuts something away, conceals something, and the painting depicting it is a two-dimensional projection of this plane. In addition to the referentiality of the duality of concealment and revelation by the plane of panel painting to art history and visual perception, Batykó thematizes the dichotomy between the representational function and of the painting and its quality as an object. With its Pop Art-like character and allusions to street art and graffiti (and thus to the beginnings of his own art), the series is an evolution of Batykó’s artistic activity both in terms of painting technique and theme.