Blow up | István Haász

15/7 – 29-8 2021

Curator | Brigitta Muladi

Vajda Múzeum | Szentendre | Hungary

“The avant-garde tradition operates with reduction, thus producing atemporal and universalist images and gestures. – writes Boris Groys – It is an art that embraces and represents secular messianic knowledge, that the world we live in is a transitional world, subject to constant change, and that the lifespan of any strong image is necessarily short.”
By communicating with everyday life and art on the same channel, the social network, the reception time of images is shortened. The visibility of an artist increases when he reacts repetitively to his own works, making variations of them, thus leaving a quickly recognizable, autonomous signal in the globalized structure of the Internet.
Even before the virtual era, István Haász worked with this strategy, ie in his lean series he modeled the effects and endless variations of the same shape, color, surface and space form on each other, using different materials.
For him, abstract painting is a gateway that allows the object world to transcend in the direction of the transcendent.
The title Blow up is no a coincidence. Antonioni’s most famous film is about the peculiar relationship between reality and image, but in reality the whole of art, the reality seen and filtered through the eyes of the artist, is put into discourse. The film was preceded by a series of zooming and enlarging experiments on the director’s painting Le Montagne Incantate (371 images), where he examined how size and the photographic process change the reception, interpretation, and meaning of an image.