Baksai József

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The exhibition resurrected from the Godot Gallery's original WordPress archive.

Full exhibition text

The Godot Gallery cordially invites you.

József Baksai

visual artist

to the opening of the exhibition

2002 on 13 of June at 19 o’clock.

The exhibition will be opened by: István Hajdu

The exhibition can be viewed 2002 until July 12.

The most striking feature of Baksai's canvases is their paste‑rich, tactile, touch‑responsive surface, whose protrusions and craters create an impression akin to the undulations of a landscape or a relief sculpture. He achieves this effect through a unique method of applying paint: he almost hammers oil paint onto the canvas, and, like Rembrandt, frequently works it by hand or with a palette knife. This paint‑application technique is impasto – a paste‑laden, heavy brushwork that is also the signature of contemporary Hungarian painters such as Levente Baranyai and Krisztián Horváth. Nevertheless, Baksai's sensory surfaces refuse to calm from a distance; they call the viewer closer again. The onlooker is unsettled as every point offers something else, something from the side, and something again in high‑key light. A terrifying trick he possesses is painting outlines on his works that are visible only from particular angles. He creates this effect, for instance, by painting black onto a black ground, making the subject separate from the background only through its plasticity and only under specific angles or lighting conditions. The surfaces formed from thick clumps evoke tectonic movements, perfectly echoed by the earth tones he prefers and by the figurative allusions to the four classical elements, mythologies, and grand, static intellectual systems. In Baksai's painting, form meets raw material and forms an exciting, stunning elegance.

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