A. Nagy Gábor: MMS, Tömörített festmény

Short listing

An exhibition resurrected from Godot Gallery's original WordPress archive.

Full exhibition text

The Godot Gallery respectfully invites you

Gábor A. Nagy

MMS – Compressed painting

for the opening of the exhibition titled

On 2004 March 31 at 20 o’clock.

It is hard to squeeze new facts into an old conceptual system that stems from a previous philosophy, or as the old saying goes, to pour new wine into an old cask. These experiments are always awkward, because they tempt us to focus inevitably on the breaking of the old cask, rather than to rejoice in the new wine.

Werner Heisenberg

Electric, electronic and information technologies have brought us a society of communication. These technologies are rooted in the deepest changes that have taken place in social life over the last century, changes that have not only reshaped our physical environment but also our mental constructs, and thereby our entire realm of imagination.

Throughout history, successive new technologies – initially for transforming raw materials, then for extracting energy, and now information technologies – have taken humanity

Today the individual finds itself within a complex mesh of mutual interconnections, where everything is related to everything else. The notion of connection plays an increasingly important role in contemporary modes of thought. It lies at the heart of the questions posed to all science – and indeed beyond that, to life and, of course, to artistic practice.

The MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is the photo‑making and photo‑sending service of mobile phones – it is now one of the simplest and fastest ways to capture images. As our phones are almost always with us, we can easily record, store or send anything, anywhere, at any time to the world around us.

Gábor A. Nagy has long been preoccupied with how the changes and new connections brought about by information technology affect our way of thinking, our behaviour and our environment. The titles of the paintings that are on display in our gallery now are playful references to the important differences between painting and the information society, and to our relationship with time and speed. Painting is “slow”; by tradition it seeks a link with eternity, whereas the fast‑paced culture of our age is concerned with punctual appearance. This contradiction is clearly traceable on both the creation and reception sides: painting is a time‑consuming genre.

A. Gábor Nagy’s images are models that invite viewers into the world beyond the hypnotic order of pixels, encouraging a glimpse beyond the matrix. In the pictures, the fleeting rhythms of subjective experience and the depersonalised outer world dissolve in the emptiness of representation and narration, in the colourful whirlwind of tiny squares.

Because recognising the details of the representation often requires extra effort, Gábor Nagy allows the viewer’s creative imagination space, thereby drawing them into the creative process. During this particular interactivity the artist’s visual world becomes complete when supplemented with the images of the observer’s own memory. This completeness, the glamour that assembles perfectly from afar, however, falls apart as a dazzling spectacle when examined up close.

Press contact