Retention – Release

In my works from the past 6-7 years, I create narrative-dense surfaces with the help of found objects and situations. The chosen, invited “characters” are now components of a different reality in their new context, compared to what they once were. My fundamental experience is that in our present world, the past, present, and future seem to constantly slide into one another. 20-30 years ago, these were more distinctly separated...

The new, rearranged stories depicted in my works are completely independent of specific timeframes and spatial situations; however, the new relationships created between the visual elements construct a surface that embodies a highly authentic reality.

I can perceive my existence as a constant act of observation, where the direction and intensity of this observation can be chosen at will. The system of released and controlled moments selects the found and chosen visual elements and weaves them together into a new story. Even though we all have different systems of memory, I hope that everyone will be able to recognize their own stories and realities in the piece. For me, it is always the thought I want to realize that is most important. Sometimes, I use traditional painting tools for this, as I find them most suitable for the task. At other times, entirely different materials and processes emerge on the surfaces of my works. Over the past few years, my series of collages built into ink gesture surfaces and my stitch systems appearing on the surfaces of the works, created from old, hand-woven textile pieces, have been developed simultaneously.

A quote from the artist Endre Bálint: 

"The many superimposed symbols together explain the plasticity of our destiny and provide an opportunity to increase self-awareness. For me, my montages are a tool for exploring a mind-boggling labyrinth, whose entrances and exits are identical, but the monotony of the endless procession of cascades is made bearable by the experience of small moments of infinity."

I have named my textile-based images “Archaic – Tensioned – Soft – Concrete Images.” No coloring agents were used in the creation of the image surfaces; I constructed the pictures from the original colors of the canvases. The materials used for the works are solely old linen and hemp sacks, and other hand-woven textile scraps (damaged, essentially waste textiles) that accompanied people in their work, serving them, and thus were not at all decorative. These textile pieces were sewn together to form panel images. The hemp twine stitches that appear on the surfaces “group together,” walking across the texture. The “movement” of life, fate, somehow got embedded in these textiles, and the works created serve as memory keepers for the people who used them during the past century—people who may no longer even be alive. The pieces in the series raise questions about the transformation of our relationship to objects and their repair, the relativity and interchangeability of the concepts of valuable and worthless. During the creation of the works, I was also interested in how much the function and position of a given object can transform. For example, flour sacks, originally purely functional objects, “step” to the other side, losing their functionality and transforming into puritanical artworks. These works can be classified in the field of geometric art, concrete art, but at the same time, they also contain its opposites, as the straight lines bend and soften. The surface of the images is puritanical, revealing nothing, admitting and showing clearly, straightforward and honest in every sense. During the loss of function, the old stains, fabric damages transformed into signs communicating with the hemp twine stitches.

Our daily experience is the continuous instability of authenticity and reality around us; with my works, I try to counteract this process.

"In Zoltai's painted ink-collage paintings there is always an abstract gestural foundation and a collage-type narrative that reveals a story or sets us on a path to find it for ourselves.

In his book Ink and Brushes, Pál Miklós describes an invention of Chinese painters, which he calls the moving point of view. Bea Zoltai's ink and collage series have a similar "moving point of view". The pieces in each series have a story in themselves as a single frame of film, but they can be juxtaposed and assembled into a larger whole, like a story in a film. I found the kind of mood and complexity, at once dynamic and still, that is so characteristic of these series in a poem by Li Tai-po: "All the birds have flown up and gone; / A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. / We never tire of looking at each other – / Only the mountain and I." (Li tai-po)”/ Mária Kondor-Szilágyi Phd Art Historian

Opening speech by Erzsébet Tatai Art Historian

A kiállításmegnyitó szövege letölthető itt

You can visit The exhibition from 12th of February to 7th of March 2025, during the gallery's opening hours.