Kind of

Levente Bálványos – Kind of

Levente Bálványos is a sculptor, but he does not make traditional sculptures. He moves on his own "spatial" borders, first on the borderline between architecture and sculpture, then on the razor's edge of relief and the sensitive surface plane. According to Bálványos' ars poetic, space is not only "the classical framework of artistic self-interpretation" but also the work’s origin of the conception. He is interested in the continuous reduction of space, the minimization of elements that emerge from the surface, the "surface without depth" or otherwise the "play of minimal depth". His sculptures and constructions are characterised by a highly sensitive, complex and intellectually sophisticated use of plastic surfaces and geometric elements. It is concerned with geometric elements, the relationship between shifting and superimposed planes of space and space sections. His work is dominated by the intricate yet delicate hovering between symmetry and asymmetry, the duality of transparency and exclusion, simplicity and complexity, freedom and constraint. The exhibition at the Ladó Gallery presents a selection of works by this constructive-concrete artist from the last ten years. There are seemingly wobbly, yet stable abstract spatial constructions; wooden reliefs composed of found materials, planks, and pieces of frames, as well as playful flat blocks/space-images formed by colourful, curved, and amorphous, almost organic parts. We present new works, "drawing-reliefs" based on graph paper. This strict order, a series of tiny squares, is "broken" by Bálványos, who moves the formal world of "irregular" reliefs with echoing elements, fading, and a picture within a picture motif. We can see graphite drawings, as well as graphite reliefs made using pencil leads and plaster: protruding sticks growing outwards from the plaster, barely three-dimensional graphite threads frozen into ice, the fallible and fragile graphite mess is in fact a "quasi-space" juxtaposed with "over-dimensionalized" real space; a graphite forest light as a feather on the border between plane and space. The works contain hints of Barbara Hepworth, Uccello, Tatlin and Malevich.

text: Kriszta Dékei