The concept of Spread the Field comes from sports: it refers to a tactic in which players position themselves across the field in order to stretch the opponent’s defense, forcing them to disperse and leaving potential gaps. In this exhibition, however, the term acquires a social resonance. In political discourse it can also refer to phenomena such as dividing communities, the dispersal of attention, or the controversy of issues. Whether through deliberate information warfare or the organic overflow of data, the result is a mixture of the significant and the trivial, thus producing confusion. News about events that until recently would have been unthinkable have become everyday occurrences – yet, overwhelmed by constant stimuli, they are quickly forgotten.
Representation and image-making are processes of knowledge production, tools for understanding our environment and the world; yet when pushed to excess, they may generate chaos and incomprehensible abstraction. Both Ádám Széll and Ciprian Mureșan employ the gesture of drawing-over as a method of constructing and deconstructing their subjects. Their works complement each other in content: while Széll examines the unfinished, mundane everyday and the flux of mass culture, Mureșan starts from history, using high art both to pay homage to and to critically confront the canon.
The exhibition Spread the Field exposes the gaps that emerge in our defenses and, from a unique yet objective standpoint, offers insight into the divisive forces of our society and of the canon.
–Text by Ferenc Domokos
