Artists: Dániel Bencs and Máté Bencs
Exhibition title: Same Same But Different
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: October 11 – November 15, 2023
Photography: Dávid Biró / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Horizont Gallery, Budapest
Vincent van Gogh wrote in one of his letters that falling in love is like discovering a new continent. This observation is also valid the other way around, because in both cases, by penetrating into the unknown, we can dissolve into something bigger than us, which offers the opportunity of alluring disappearance, and it can eventually lead to magical solitude.
Through the artworks they created together, the exhibition of Dániel Bencs and Máté Bencs presents their journeys where they accumulated a rich set of motifs. The magical atmosphere of diverse regions is reflected in their artworks differently, but at the same time they also outline a mutual direction, a meeting point where their observations unite. The purpose of this exhibition is to condense the different impressions of the two brothers into pictures, thus revealing the similarities and differences between the interpretation of the same experience from two points of view. Their paintings deal with the relationship of religion and mass culture, the merging of the two, which was inspired by the commercial products displayed in Asian home sanctuaries. Red Bull energy drinks presented as offerings to the Buddha emanate a special sacred-pop atmosphere, by which we can witness the penetration of a product into a higher spiritual realm, building a bridge between two seemingly distant worlds. Andy Warhol’s statement, that it is fantastic that the poorest person cools himself with the same Coca-Cola as the president, in this case manifests in the consumption of the same energy drink as the Buddha. Nowadays, we build the shrine of our own private mythology from the fragments of different ideologies in the same way that we choose products from the shelves of the stores, so a mix of thoughts from faraway parts of the world end up next to each other on the checkout line.
-Dániel Bencs
