Finissage ~ Bea Zoltai: Retention - Release

About the Exhibition:

I have named my textile-based images “Archaic – Tensioned – Soft – Concrete Images.” No coloring agents were used in the creation of the image surfaces; I constructed the pictures from the original colors of the canvases. The materials used for the works are solely old linen and hemp sacks, and other hand-woven textile scraps (damaged, essentially waste textiles) that accompanied people in their work, serving them, and thus were not at all decorative. These textile pieces were sewn together to form panel images. The hemp twine stitches that appear on the surfaces “group together,” walking across the texture. The “movement” of life, fate, somehow got embedded in these textiles, and the works created serve as memory keepers for the people who used them during the past century—people who may no longer even be alive. The pieces in the series raise questions about the transformation of our relationship to objects and their repair, the relativity and interchangeability of the concepts of valuable and worthless. During the creation of the works, I was also interested in how much the function and position of a given object can transform. For example, flour sacks, originally purely functional objects, “step” to the other side, losing their functionality and transforming into puritanical artworks. These works can be classified in the field of geometric art, concrete art, but at the same time, they also contain its opposites, as the straight lines bend and soften. The surface of the images is puritanical, revealing nothing, admitting and showing clearly, straightforward and honest in every sense. During the loss of function, the old stains, fabric damages transformed into signs communicating with the hemp twine stitches.

Our daily experience is the continuous instability of authenticity and reality around us; with my works, I try to counteract this process.

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