Nyíri Orsi // Hallgass a bolondra

The starting point for Orsi Nyíri’s debut exhibition at Einspach & Czapolai gallery is a short parable by Søren Kierkegaard about a clown who warns an audience that a fire has broken out in the theatre. The spectators, however, assume that his warning is merely part of the performance, and so they laugh and applaud. For Nyíri, the story raises an unsettling question: what happens when we fail to take a warning seriously precisely because it comes from someone we are already inclined to distrust?

The exhibition transforms this situation into a spatial and painterly scenario. On the main wall, a monumental banquet scene unfolds: elegant figures, textiles and the sensuous details of celebration create the image of an apparently undisturbed social gathering. Yet the scene is harmonious only at first glance. Behind its seductive surface, a sense of threat gradually becomes increasingly perceptible.

Among the composition’s cinematic and literary references are Robert Moore’s film Murder by Death and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death. As in Poe’s tale, colour plays an important dramaturgical role in Nyíri’s works: the banquet scene is rendered in green, the Fool in blue and Death in red. The apparent tranquillity of the feast is already disrupted within the painting itself by a small detail: the portrait of Death is reflected in the gleaming surface of a knife.

Between the banquet scene and the viewer, Nyíri suspends a double-sided figure in space, with the Fool appearing on one side and Death on the other. The art-historical precedents for this dual figure are found in the Renaissance engravings of Hans Sebald Beham. The suspended figure partially obscures the painting behind it, meaning that in order to see the banquet in its entirety, the viewer must physically move around the Fool.

By doing so, however, the viewer also becomes part of the narrative: they disregard the warning, give in to curiosity, and upon reaching the other side of the figure, find themselves face to face with Death.

Mónika Zsikla