PRESS TEXT

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We are pleased to present Ákos Ezer’s second solo show at our gallery. In Ezer’s work, the human figure is always very present: in his latest works, he takes this to the utmost in a sense by virtually squeezing life-sized or larger than life-sized body (-parts) into a rectangular pictorial format. His Fernand Léger-esque male figures could be anyone stumbling through life and through the scene depicted. The settings of the images are generally everyday scenes: parties, card games, waiting for the bus, but also things that are not so everyday (for the urban dweller), like collecting wood and sawing. But the everyday life of Ezer’s figures is defined by tripping, falling, collapsing and similar “faults,” a frequent title he uses, like “fail,” or “falling.” Within Ezer’s consistent universe of painting, the fall is not a tragic and mystical fall of an Ikarus, but understood as slapstick, a grotesque slip up. Ezer is interested in the lowest common denominator of human life. The essence of the banal, the movements and distortions of a younger generation (his own and the following generation, he was born in 1989), in their vlogs (video blogs) that he often watches, their everyday conversations about unimportant things, their posts on social media, always the same, fascinate the artist and fill his visual world. For Ezer, there is an analogy to (abstract) painting: working on the empty space with a great deal of painterly material to achieve “nothing” and yet everything; filling a blank page, reorganizing a two dimensional surface over and over as the essence of painting, that attempts to picture something, unintentionally and with self-evidence. In 2017 Ákos Ezer received the Esterházy Price. He lives and works in Budapest and Tóalmás, Hungary. He ist represented by Tanja Pol Galerie and Art + Text, Budapest.