Artist: Orsolya Nyíri
Exhibition title: The Will is Strong, but the Flesh is Weak
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: March 6 – April 10, 2024
Photography: Dávid Biró / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Horizont Gallery, Budapest
Everyday experiences dissolve in our memories, and moments that reflect the complex situations of everyday life in their reality become less permanent. A scene is lost in total oblivion, and our imagination tries to fill in the gaps with created images or feelings. These distorted memories are created reflexively to cover up the uncertainty of our consciousness. The ability of our subconscious to fill in the holes is only by chance. Only by recalling them and questioning their authenticity can their real or fictional origins be revealed. The fleshed-out details reveal much about the creative imagination of our minds. The opposite phenomenon can also be observed: events that are accidentally highlighted. Moments picked out of everyday life are insignificant in themselves, becoming dominant only in the context of circumstances.
The dramaturgy of Orsolya Nyíri’s paintings in The Will is Strong, but the Flesh is Weak is a reality imbued with fiction, a synthesis of reality and surreality, where personal and collective experiences are blended with elements that are reminiscent of visions. These are situations stuck in everyday life that become familiar precisely because of their forgettability, and images of our illusion born of our imagination, born of the collision of our thoughts of good and evil. It is a juxtaposition of the moral struggles that play out in our minds and the ordinary episodes and characters that take place in the background, where the subordination of the plots is not established and the attention is democratised by the mutual division of roles. The images are imbued with an aesthetic postmodern nihilism dissolved in a kind of serenity, a state of uncertainty and self-doubt, with which the perception of time disappears. The characters in the images do not seek to recover the time that has been lost, but rather to experience its fluid atmosphere and environment. The universe constructed in this way is reminiscent of the world of cartoons; this layer can only be interpreted as a symbol, essential for the consumption and dilution of the content. It is an illusion of reality, a dreamlike journey where reality ceases to exist and we begin to negotiate the psychology or visuality of a constructed world, a more precise, visually descriptive world, all its elements transformed into an experience.
https://www.instagram.com/orsinyiri
