About the artist: the 28-year-old Róbert Batykó finished his studies as a painter at the Hungarian Fine Arts University in 2005.  In the following years he was awarded two scholarships: in 2007 the Strabag Award for painters and in 2008 the Derkovits Gyula scholarship.  Despite his young age, he has had several solo and group exhibitions, and his works were introduced at different international art fairs.  His paintings have achieved great popularity in both professional and collectors circles.  Many of his works are to be found in public and private collections.  This is his second solo exhibition at the acb Gallery, where he is showing examples of his brand new series.

About the exhibition: Looking at Róbert Batykó's new paintings for the first time, one sees everyday tools found around constructions sights: cement chisels, punners, saws or driving gears.   Pairing these simple subjects with the experimentation of completely clear surfaces, the painter achieves to pose serious philosophical questions.  Batykó first started depicting tools in 2006-2007, illustrating audio- and VHS tapes, knives, weapons, and various musical instruments.  He tends to pull the objects out of their normal surrounding and places them on a canvas without perspectives or background.  The primary perception of these objects, their naked selves, and the varied possible interpretations behind them in the flat space are the driving motives in Batykó's paintings.  Reducing the complexity of forms is stressed in his works, along with the minimal variety of colors: on his newer works yellow, black, and gray dominate.
Batykó takes the depiction of objects to a new level in his recent paintings: he is abstracting the chosen forms, which therefore are on the edge of recognizable and mistakable for other objects or creatures.  With his portrayals of machines (?), the artist draws our attention to the limited and contingent characteristics of human discerning.  His forms are both living and dead, rational and irracional, grabable and incomprehensible.  All his works have one mutual trait: they are realizations of personal experiences, memories, past feelings, and thoughts.  Stressed experimentation with surface – the varying thickness of the paint – is apparent on Batykó's new series: they require a steady and thorough study by the viewer.