Nagy Gábor György

The Godot Gallery cordially invites you.

Gábor György Nagy, PIN 1966

The opening of the exhibition titled ___ will take place on 2006 November 2 at 20 o’clock.

The exhibition will be opened by Bianca Iványi.

The transparency of genres and media, their fusion, and the constant bleeding of their functions are particularly evident in the field of graphic art. The originally manual‑technique‑based genre has also embraced images produced by technical media—photo, computer print, printout, electrography—a back‑and‑forth movement between manual and technical media is observable in the work of individual artists. Nagy Gábor György, in my view, is an artist who possesses a traditionally painterly perspective, yet in practice he is most closely aligned with graphic expressions and genres. (He also obtained his master’s degree in graphics.) This duality characterises his works throughout, as seen in the two series exhibited here. This way of thinking assumes recognition that painting has a historical advantage, which lends the genre an additional aesthetic value (whichever signified quality) and a stronger symbolic load than photo. He then transposes this line into photographs produced with a computer, and the observing of the finished piece becomes similar to that of a painting.

The images serve as a bridge between the world and humanity. Man “ex‑sits”, that is, the world is not directly accessible to him, so it is the images that must represent it. Yet by doing so the images place the world and humanity in the middle—here we can essentially speak of “forgetting”. Man forgets that there were those who created the images in order that we could orient ourselves in the world with their help. He can no longer decipher them, and so he lives in reliance on his own images: imagination has slipped into hallucination. – writes Vilém Flusser in *The Philosophy of Photography*. In the works of Gábor‑György Nagy, whose very basis is the photo he himself took, it is not about forgetting but about remembering. It does not remind us of seen pictures but of mental states, moods, emotions that we sense when we glimpse the images. This mechanism of effect can, despite that, belong to the technical image itself, because we have a tendency to regard photo‑based images simply as imprints of reality, looking upon them as “windows”. Yet, Flusser continues, “the ‘objectivity’ of the technical image is an illusion. Like every image, the technical image is not merely symbolic, but displays far more abstract clusters of symbols than traditional images.” Gábor‑György Nagy deliberately arranges his images into series that allow the viewer not to retain a single picture, but the conceptual meaning of the image. For this, of course, reality must be rearranged somewhat to express more than mere appearance, and reception can be made complete not just by “organising” the view itself but also by “injecting” time into the act of witnessing. Using Flusser’s terminology, one can influence the “time window”. The “time window” in which the viewing interval of the two series moves is neither a quick “glance”, nor a calm “inspection”, but the “jarring look”. This jarring look readily transforms the things into shameless visions, as Gábor‑György Nagy transposes the imprints of reality carried by the photographs into subjective visions. MULADI BRIGITTA

Available until November 10, from Tuesday to Friday 10 to 18, on Saturday between 10 and 13 o’clock.