Róbert Batykó: Image Trap
Róbert Batykó's (b. 1981) painting programme over the past twenty years represent a constant crossover between abstraction and figurative tendencies; his most recent work, produced during a six-month artist-in-residency in the Netherlands, is another significant milestone in this hybrid process.
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His new works continue the playful figurativity that characterises his paintings and mark a shift in his previously dominant post-digital painting programme.
As a defining element of Batykó's art, the latest series of paintings also reflects the hypnotic visual power of consumer culture. In doing so, they also refer back to the artist's earlier series of various packaging materials from 2015-2016, which has since become iconic. But they also evoke a series of paintings he painted (partly) during a previous stay in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2014, which address the problem of urban waste with more complex painterly qualities. However, self-reflexive, self-referential themes of art (paint masses coming out of tubes), social and existential motifs of burnout (burnt matchstick, fire, lava), metaphors of slowing down and surreal symbols of the unconscious (deep-sea creatures), or even references to the mechanical nature of industrial production (parts of various tools and machines) are also present in the paintings.
At the same time, in contrast to the "ghostly" expressivity that has recently become almost a trademark of Batykó's painting, a more purified pictorial world unfolds before us. However, the spectral layers have not disappeared but are part of a more complex pictorial logic composed of multiple qualities. One sign of this is that following the iconographic codes and metaphors of digital culture, the more sensual, material, meticulously layered qualities of painting are reinforced in the paintings. For example, large, continuous, planar color fields blend with the metallic shimmer of three-dimensional objects. The creation of these layers and references operate as "visual samplings" whereby the various motifs and references assembled into generous large-scale, airy compositions in the egalitarian medium of the image field. Traps of images that captivate the viewer while at the same time offering a dispersity of possible interpretations.
acb Gallery
Founded in Budapest in 2003, acb Gallery has consistently grown in the past two decades establishing itself as one of the leading actors in the Hungarian and Eastern European art market. Initially, the gallery’s focus was on Hungarian and international emerging and mid-generation neo-conceptual artists, who became active after the political changes in the former Eastern Bloc in 1990. Since then, the gallery has expanded its focus, and now represents numerous Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists who have left their mark on art history since the 1960s and 1970s, as well as members of the youngest generations beside the already established ones.
Since the autumn of 2022, acb runs three exhibition spaces: the main gallery space, acb Attachment, which serves as a project space, and acb Plus, dedicated to large-scale solo and group presentations.
acb’s research and publishing department, acb ResearchLab was founded in 2015. This platform within the gallery aims to fill the gaps in the reception and publication of Hungarian neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde oeuvres by studying bodies of works and art phenomena previously treated as peripheral.
The gallery holds significant importance within the global art market, actively promoting its artists nationally as well as internationally and engaging in art fairs, such as the Art Basel in Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Frieze Masters London or the ARCO Madrid.
