Botond Keresztesi is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary Hungarian painting. His works simultaneously evoke the surreal distortions of consumer society, the nostalgic fragments of pop culture, and reconfigured references from art history. Earlier this year, he presented a solo exhibition at the X Museum in Beijing, and now, for the first time, Hungarian audiences can experience his latest body of work in the castle-like, magical exhibition space of Longtermhandstand.
At the center of the exhibition T I F F lies the transformation of mass production and memory. The Tamagotchi, once a childhood desire and digital companion, has now become a mere icon and nostalgic relic. It appears symbolically in Keresztesi’s paintings, among visual universes where history and pop culture coexist on equal terms.
The works on view conjure the burning wooden church of Norwegian black metal, where the space of aquaristics unexpectedly intersects with the motifs of criminology. Steampunk shapes resembling water pistols, along with overdesigned objects that seem almost generated by artificial intelligence, open up new worlds in their details. Curling as a visual motif emerges from a poster glimpsed at a Milan bus stop, while smaller canvases recall Bosch’s grotesque figures, reimagined as if they were mass-produced toy silhouettes.
In the tower-like compositions, the silhouettes of the 1956 memorial totems at Széna Square are burned into the artist’s vision, while in the large aquarium painting a fragment of a Henry Moore sculpture breathes alongside a seahorse. From the burning Norwegian church a rocket-like image of the Burzum myth shoots out, invoking the dark memory of metal culture.
In this exhibition, Keresztesi once again creates an alternative painterly cosmos, where the congestions of visual memory, the defunct bodies of collective pop icons, and reinterpreted painterly traditions slide into one another, producing kaleidoscopic images.
-Péter Bencze
