Márton Nemes at acb Gallery

Artist: Márton Nemes

Exhibition title: Look into the Sun with Your Eyes Closed

Venue: acb Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

Date: March 11 – April 15, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and acb Gallery, Budapest

Márton Nemes (1986, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) creates artworks in a hybrid genre with bright colors and contrasting shapes. In his first solo exhibition entitled Look into the Sun with Your Eyes Closed at acb Gallery in Budapest, the artist presents new paintings, sculptures, and a complex multimedia installation. The artworks take up an abstract mixture of different color variations, color applications, and shapes. The artist’s color palette consists of gaudy, bright variegated colors. They appear like neon tones, which Nemes elaborates with aesthetic color gradients. This coloring is reminiscent of digital surfaces and advertising, while the objects are never clearly geometrically shaped. The artist creates interplays of perception by cutting the surfaces and thus opening the view to multiple levels of the artworks. The picture fragments are executed in different colors and forms, developing a unique dynamic of space. Gestural splashes of color, which tie in with the Informal, run across diffrerent surfaces of the works. They evoke images and light situations familiar from clubs, while a musical rhythm seems to manifest itself visually in the installation.

The foundation of the art of Márton Nemes is built on the grand art historical narratives of the 20th century. The gentle color gradients of his work reference the paintings of Mark Rothko, while he is also working with the idea of the Shaped canvas originating from Frank Stella, yet he also re-contextualizes the open-cut surfaces of Lucio Fontana. Combining all these, Nemes successfully develops a completely new visual language, in which he mixes two-dimensional and sculptural aspects of artworks, which definitely have a 21st-century color palette.

In the work Painting of the 21st century, the artist combines a LED surface with a sculpture-like installation. In front of the ever-changing digital image background, which shows animated gestures of paintings, a metal construction with colored fans is embedded. Electronic music is a major influence in the artist’s works, and the inspiration for the moving fans and changing screen came from a famous techno club in London. In the new Meta Paintings, next to the painterly, gestural planes behind structures shaped by laser-cut, mirroring surfaces were placed which make the viewer merge with the gestural abstraction. The title Meta also deliberately refers to the perception of realities in digital space. Here, the mirror image can be experienced analogously together with the aesthetics of the digital. The sculpture placed outside of the gallery, Razzle Dazzle 02 consists of multicolored curved steel elements within an open structure. The title refers to the abstract painting of military ships which deceive the enemy. Here, the abstract sculpture is translated into the plastic with bright variegated colors that take hold of the space. Where does the picture begin and end? What is the frame

or is everything the image carrier?

Additively, Márton Nemes links the multifaceted pictorial planes that seek a new dialogue in the exhibition as a group. The exhibition´s title Look into the Sun With Your Eyes Closed can thereby be read on the visual experience and its colorful processing in the works. Márton Nemes develops abstract works between painting and sculpture with a digital influence and a play of color and form levels, which invite to dive deeper into the work and experience the colorful world of color.

Wilko Austermann

Curator of Krefelder Kunstverein and MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach

Márton Nemes, Look into the Sun with Your Eyes Closed, 2022, exhibition view, acb Gallery, Budapest

Márton Nemes, Razzle Dazzle 02, 2022, powder coated steel, car paint | autofestek, acel, porfestett acel, 252h x 146w x 132d cm

Márton Nemes, Bipolar 01, 2022, powder coated steel, car paint, travertine limestone | porfestett acel, autofestek, traventin meszko, 202h x 50w x 30d cm

Márton Nemes, Look into the Sun with Your Eyes Closed, 2022, exhibition view, acb Gallery, Budapest

Márton Nemes, Painting of the 21st Century, 2022, LED wall, axial fan, spring, steel, car paint, powder coated steel, electrical control, speaker | ledfal, axial ventilator, rugo, acel, autofestek, porfestett acel, elektromos vezerles, hangfal, 448h x 288w x 88d cm