October 27, 2021 - December 4, 2021
Tibor iSKI KOCSIS' twenty-fourth solo show entitled Landfall focuses on men's approach to themselves and respectively to the world.
After his well-known and much-exhibited series of LUNA, the tonal charcoal drawings of recent years, a world devoid of people and earthly nature, this exhibition can be considered the summary of the oeuvre and ars poetics of iSKI KOCSIS. The complex relationship between man and nature is a recurring inspiration for his symbolic paintings and drawings as well as a constant focus of his conceptual artistic discourse.
Since the early years of 2000, the artist has been intrigued by the interpretation of aesthetical beauty and majestic in contemporary imagery, to which he has assigned an individual landscape structure. His reflections on global-local ecological problemsdemonstrating a rural sensibility reveal a symbol-centered aesthetic approach. The exhibition carries forward the ideas of iSKI KOCSIS' previous series titled Ecotourism (2001-2005) while intensifying the gloomy view of ecological anxiety becoming increasingly intense nowadays. Assigning the man-woman portraits to the subject, he connects it to our own lives, our time, and the current state of the Earth. His images vary in tone, being sometimes depressing, other times more positive. This contrast is reinforced by Antonio López García's abstracted cityscape paraphrase, still offering the spectator a sense of hope and the possibility of a new life.
iSKI KOCSIS explores with photographic eyes but depicts with painterly means. Addressing fundamental aesthetic questions and remaining faithful to the traditional panel painting form, he seeks to return to the basic principle by synthesizing genres and focusing relentlessly on contemporary ecological issues. Water, air, fire, and earth are the essential elements that run through iSKI KOCSIS' entire oeuvre. We shall interpret them as the origin along with the paraphrases. They link past and present and further act as cultural references and mementos of the recollection layers. In the Landfall exhibition, the artist's familiar world, mostly devoid of people, is complemented by narrative genre and portrait depictions embedded in the current painting discourse. The life-size paraphrase of Károly Ferenczy's 1904 painting titled Painter and Model (in the Studio) can thus be seen as both a tribute to the beauty and a return to the birth of autonomous Hungarian painting. The human portraits are rounded off by the drawing paraphrase of Hans Holbein's portrait of a man from 1541 and a photo image of a woman by an unknown photographer, probably from the second half of the 19th century, both made with silver.
ISKI KOCSIS' emblematic nature paintings are richly detailed and painterly in their sensitivity, and the choice of the medium itself can be defined as a layer of interpretation. The exhibition includes works in various media - oil, charcoal, silver, pencil, pastel, giclée print - on folded, cut, or rumpled, and shaped canvas or paper. Thus we see the narrative image of a present rich in art-historical and cultural reflections, which simultaneously points towards a dystopian future, in its shadow - and accordance with the artist's faith - an alternative, hopeful vision of the future emerges.