Artist: József Csató
Exhibition title: Not Enough Buckets To Hold The Teras Of Joy
Curated by: Peter Bencze
Venue: ENA Viewing Space, Budapest, Hungary
Date: August 19 – September, 2019
Photography: © Aron Weber, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, Everybody Needs Art
“Myths and tears pervade József Csató’s entire oeuvre, so the exhibition “Not Enough Buckets To Hold The Tears Of Joy” seeks to unify the infinite variety of his manifestations in a single compendium.
The material elements constituting the substrate of the artworks on display are dry, but not too dry, thirsty, but not too thirsty, or maybe dry and not too interested?
The semantic and tactile harshness of Csató’s work is accompanied by the almost baroque evolution of the different ways the relation between image and object, painting and material is developed.
However, this dryness is not totally arid, its shore is near and the languid arid nods, fruits of a formal language condemned to continuous exercise persist, leaving an impression of the gesture and the concept. Everything is interconnected, but not intersected.
Csató’s pictorial gesture is characterised by a sinuous veracity that seems to project in front of itself what is already represented, a real confirmation and visualisation of the mythical iconography by means of figurative and abstract elements. Maybe this is not the best way to draw from that evanescent aura that is at the same time acclaimed by the plant or by the sky that we find in front of us? Maybe the brush/pencil strokes of Csató, that the artist himself defines mythologies of sketches, constitute the lightest essence of such an investigation?
The detailed and complicated study of the results obtained from the fusion of different techniques on each other and the various expressive materials used gives that breath a force and at the same time a naïve tone that winks the eye at a possible sentiment which might be defined as “joy”, wherein the discovery of the plot turns into drops wetting the fragments of the painting that provide the intangible nuance that smells like mythology.”
-Domenico de Chirico, 2019
