Muladi Brigitta - Veszprémi Nóra szerk.: A festmény ideje – Az újraértelmezett hagyomány (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai)

English texts - Spectacle and Reflexivity. Naturalism and technorealism in contemporary Hungarian painting. Sándor Hornyik

provided the title of the exhibition.) To a certain extent, Krisztián Horváth's paintings offer a counterpoint to the work of the other artists in Sensaria, who share the creed of representing only what is visible. Horváth in contrast creates a land that cannot be seen in reality, an unknown, distant entity, which in this sense can be linked to László Mednyánszky's landscapes, the expressions, according to the painter, of "the conscious or unconscious feeling of the mood, of mortality. (...) This intimate sensation is the privilege of refined organisms. Unawares, it moves us to think about eternity. Because if we see the wall that confronts our view every day, and if we feel the wall to be close, then we will inevitably ask ourselves what lies beyond." (Mednyánszky's journal 1898) As for those painters who do not belong to the group, it is in the pictures of Viktor Surman that the place, as the realm of the artist, becomes part of the intellectual construct. The "painting" is "placed" in the background, which not only reflects his own personality and social status, but also the approach of the times he likes, from the Renaissance to Romanticism. He himself chose the works that are to offset his own, the delicately sensitive landscapes of Antal Ligeti and Géza Mészöly. Balázs Pálfi's approach to the question is the simplest and most painterly: every one of his pictures represents a piece of his own environment. The logical choice of counterparts were the interiors of János Tornyai and the genres of István Csók. The place as an area appropriated, the garden as an allegory of art or particularly painting, appears in the work of several painters. Gyula Balogh, the most informal of the exhibiting artists, considers the most banal details of everyday reality worthy of paint, anything from garden fountains to tiny pieces of the lawn. Gyula Konkoly employs the stylistic markers of Impressionism, and now places his sometimes ironic works next to the paintings of one of the bestknown Hungarian artists, Pál Szinyei Merse. Zsolt Ferenczy's narrative series are "written" in a satirical tone, they draw on, and point beyond, the modernist approach. The place as the studio, as the scene where art is born, is among the themes of Tibor Csernus, Gábor Lajta, János Nagy Balogh, Attila Kondor, László Dániel and András Halász. Intent on expressing the subject, the portraits and self-portraits of András Baranyay, Gábor Szenteleki and Péter Sudár become the places of the personality. The exhibition as a whole presents everyday places and events with a matter-of-course spontaneity, and tries to position these themes, together with the traditional technique, in the context of contemporary painting. Should we attempt to find a name for a traditional style that is in constant transformation, the term "informal or trivial realism" would seem least out of place. Spectacle and Reflexivity Naturalism and technorealism in contemporary Hungarian painting Sándor Hornyik Spectacle and reflexivity have become key notions in the criticism of modernity or should we say modernism. Spectacle's career began with Guy Debord (and Marxist cultural criticism) and spans to the science of visual culture, while reflexivity plays equally important parts in very different cultural practices, like appropriation art and science studies. This process led to the slackening and eventually the deflation of the meanings of these notions. Still, I believe spectacle and reflexivity serve as good starting points when trying to interpret and re-contextualize the phenomena of realism and naturalism, notions even harder to grasp. I attempt to establish a rough classification of the Sensaria Group and contemporary Hungarian post-conceptualist painting, not so much based on the "style", but rather based on the "ideology" of painterly spectacle. Ideological grounds appear more solid not only because of the pluralism of styles, advertised so passionately so often, but because - on this side of Gombrich, and the far side of Nochlin - concerning faithfulness to reality and art-historical realism, style is totally irrelevant. So I would choose the expression naturalism to describe the paintings of Dániel László, Tamás Lőrincz, Lehel Kovács and Ábel Szabó, while the works of Adrián Kupcsik, András Király, László Győrffy, Szilárd Cseke and Attila Adorján seem to belong to technorealism. Between these two different and contrasting painterly attitudes there is the uncharted region of photorealism and realism in a wider sense, with the works of painters like Gábor Lajta, István Nyári, Lóránt Méhes, Gyula Konkoly, Zsigmond Károlyi, Claudia Tamás, Tibor Iski Kocsis, Ákos Szóló, or some already mentioned: Ábel Szabó and Attila Adorján. Before I would set out to establish the opposition between naturalism and technorealism, let me add a few remarks to our classification. To begin from the end: technorealism does not stem in "classic" igth-century realism, but from the hyperrealism of the sixties and the seventies, known as superrealism in America. Technorealism capitalizing on digital imagemaking is "techno" compared to this fundamentally photograpy-based realism. Lights and reflexes, materiality, bewildering (Chuck Close) and fascinating (Richard Ellis) textures are not so overdriven in technorealism. Instead of the camera focused to a hyperrealist sharpness, it is dominated by a certain medial blur, evoking the mysterious flicker of the screen, or the refraction caused by its pixels. However, photorealism is a neutral term in the polemic of nature versus media culture. It denotes a mode of representation objective, punctual and painstakingly faithful to reality, and creates a transition - medially and spiritually as well - between naturalism and technorealism. According to the art-historical tradition and the ideology of ígth-century positivist naturalism, it is clear that the naturalism of Sensaria is not of a scientific nature. It has neither theoretic, nor practical links to the naturalized epistemology characterizing the naturalism of contemporary natural sciences, using the language of biophysics and neurophysiology. In spite of that we might connect them, just to create an important and informative metaphor with the help of the expression "embodied mind". "Embodied mind" in its original context refers to the interpretation of mind not