Manual Focus

The exhibition featuring the works of Zbynek Sedlecky – a Czech artist receiving growing international recognition – and Zsombor Barakonyi – who is known on the Hungarian contemporary art scene for his unique style and technique – brings big cities to life. Both artists express their personal experiences of urban life, as conveyed through their own distinctively characteristic approaches as painters. 

The work of Strabag Award-winner Zsombor Barakonyi centers on “the city as a way of life.” He bases his paintings on his own photos, which aim to accentuate the general characteristics – rather than to focus on the unique – and to capture the cosmopolitan quality and peculiar timelessness of urban living.     
He has developed his own painting technique, which he refers to as “box painting.” This consists of using a three-dimensional, object-like wooden box as an image medium, and, instead of utilizing traditional painting techniques, applying motifs with such tools, as blades, stenciled-masked surfaces, sprays, and rubber rollers. The image surface emerges from a superimposition of paint layers, which requires conscious and planned artistic work. The sense of constructedness, which is conveyed by the paintings, adds an alienating effect to the spontaneity of the snapshots used as their basis.     
Barakonyi views his own work as “magical realist art.” His paintings are positioned somewhere between a reality that is direct and one that is magically constructed, conjuring in viewers their own city experiences, and alluding to personal experiences based on shared memories of specific places. The figures that manifest in the city settings are also correspondingly unique, but also familiar in a real or imagined way. 
 
For the Czech artist, who participated in the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the big city experience can primarily be grasped through architecture. In his large paintings, modernist buildings, architecture details, and interiors are the main defining features of the urban scene. These – at times, in themselves, at other instances, crowded with faceless extras – reveal the weight of an intangible present and an oppressive past, as carried by post-socialist urban living.
Sedlecky’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings, with their quick gestures and loose brush strokes, appear sketch-like, thus bringing their spontaneity and experientiality to the foreground. Freehand lines, splashes of paint, imprints of textured surfaces, and, sometimes, collage elements render the spectacle – which otherwise evokes feelings of threat and exposure – lively, versatile, and vibrant. In his paintings, rather than depicting moments suspended in time, Sedlecky aims to capture the constancy of change, the rush of time, and the bustle of the city.     

The works of these two artists offer viewers two strikingly unique takes on the urban experience. Barakonyi’s magically transfigured images draw on the collective memory and the experiences of cosmopolitan city dwellers, presenting viewers with a vision-like cityscape that is both personal and familiar. Sedlecky, on the other hand, builds his approach on the existential angst of those living in a post-socialist reality, reflecting on the options and prospects of the individual exposed to cosmopolitan living. The two divergent personal perspectives – the two different uses of “manual focus” – are mere pointers for viewers, however, based on which they can focus on their own urban experience.