Eliost, Karen (szerk.): Szombathy. Városjelek 1971 - 2012. Művészet Malom, Szentendre, 2012. szeptember 28 - november 11. (Szentendre, 2012)
A város törlődő jelei
and encroaching weed life visible at the edge of the frame are also expressive of the process of entropy, which through Robert Smithson found its way into the consciousness of the conceptual art of the era. Although the walls, street signs, graffiti and other incidentals that constitute the semantic surplus that appear on the margins of photographs whose ostensible focus is a rectangle of colour could in theory be anywhere and anytime, they speak to us from a specific era, which is as lost as the signs that have been so casually painted over. Many of the over-painted signs of the city collected by the artist have indeed been maturing in his conceptual cellar for three decades, loosening the tie of the image to the concrete reality the photographs nominally depict. It would be impossible to return to these sites and reconstruct the scene, both because the processes of entropy have by now passed the point of no return, rendering the marginalia captured by the artist doubly obscure, and because the history of the places in the pictures has been covered over with so many new layers that these photographs of useless things could potentially become the subjects of a future archaeology. Along with erasure, the act of over-painting resonates with notions of excess associated with over-production or more simply just over doing it, as well as serving as a reminder that despite the best efforts of the art market, at the end of the day painting is still as over now as it was circa 1970. Painting is also one of the few media that, true to his neo-avantgarde sympathies, has never been part of the wide-ranging oeuvre of Bálint Szombathy. It is therefore not hard to detect an element of humour and even scorn in the treatment meted out to the painter’s craft in his series of photographs entitled Wall Paintings, most of which date from 1973. The artist here draws our attention to another neglected and largely unnoticed urban phenomenon, the visual effect created when house painters try out different colours on the walls of a house, in the process of arriving at the right shade in a pre-Dulux era of trial and error mixing. These blocks of colour that bizarrely survive on unfinished surfaces represent a subjective process of blending undertaken by the worker, until the right shade of blue, green or pink has been achieved. Like a pre-digital Photoshop palette, the range of possible tones appears somewhat comically at the bottom of a shop front, the upper half of which has been finished in the finally chosen colour. In close up, the colour trials look like accidental paintings and it is neither important nor certain that the nameless, lowly decorator did not consider the effect that the combination and layering of paints would create, or take pleasure in his preparatory brushstrokes. Perhaps it is possible to talk here about an impulse to deconstruct the elitism of art in a democratic spirit, or at least to demystify the exaltation of technique rehearsed by the defenders of painting. As to the shades themselves, they may contain a clue to the colours of actually existing socialism, which in addition to revolutionary red, extended from the full spectrum of industrial greys and the green matt of an old Trabant to the weathered glory of postcards of socialist cities, offset in unnaturally bright primary tones. The black tubes leering from gaping holes in urban structures or emerging furtively from cracks in the ground in another series of the artist’s city signs are both uncanny and disturbing. Like unnatural growths, they disrupt the order that we expect from architecture, exposing the gory entrails of the city, the bodily functions of public organs that are usually hidden from sight behind the smooth concrete facade of institutions. There seem to be so many of them that it’s tempting to imagine the artist is offering us a metaphor for the 14
