Millefiori

Millefiori – Tamás Fuchs

Exhibition opening by: Ágnes Bihari, art writer and photographer

Tamás Fuchs’s current exhibition is built from fragmented narrative strands. The seemingly disparate mosaic elements do not depict the visual details of a single, synchronous event. These fragments have emerged from works created over the past twenty years, yet their subjects and stories span centuries and continents. A paired urn from the Qianlong dynasty, a Murano glass artist’s millefiori goblet, the Apollo spacecraft, a lakeside portrait of Roger Moore, or a solitary OxyContin tablet—each is its own world, positioned somewhere at the intersection of longing, unattainability, and memory.

When these partially filled timelines are layered atop one another, the artist’s self-portrait begins to appear: that of a collector who knows he cannot possess all the objects of his desire, and so seeks to draw them toward himself through the act of painting. As Old Shatterhand in Karl May’s Winnetou stuffs a drawing of a tribal chief into the barrel of his rifle, saying, “Your soul is now inside my gun,” Fuchs’s brush becomes a similar instrument of illusory possession. What cannot be bought can still be painted—and through representation, a fragment of the chosen form’s soul may be made one’s own. WinnetouWhen these partially filled timelines are layered atop one another, the artist’s self-portrait begins to appear: that of a collector who knows he cannot possess all the objects of his desire, and so seeks to draw them toward himself through the act of painting. As Old Shatterhand in Karl May’s Winnetou stuffs a drawing of a tribal chief into the barrel of his rifle, saying, “Your soul is now inside my gun,” Fuchs’s brush becomes a similar instrument of illusory possession. What cannot be bought can still be painted—and through representation, a fragment of the chosen form’s soul may be made one’s own.

The figures depicted in the exhibition are solitary. The millefiori goblet sometimes appears doubled, yet it is a single form, seemingly bearing a dual personality. A lone Z key on a keyboard is meaningless on its own—without Control, there is no undo. The solitary OxyContin tablet evokes the dark shadow of the American opioid crisis: the pill rarely remains alone—others soon follow. Alone it may bring bliss, en masse it brings oblivion. The Apollo spacecraft momentarily adopts a panda-like face—pareidolia: the human tendency to see faces where there are none. The bear-like expression may seem cute at first, but the machine’s body is just as alone in the vastness of space as Simon Templar would feel on the shores of Lake Balaton.

In Fuchs’s works, chromatic aberration shimmering along the contours of painted forms, the atmospheric value that colors distance, the minute tonal shifts, and the flickering ghost images all mark the unstable, vibrating threshold where the longing for possession strains against the immensity of separation. Anthropomorphism—the search for human shape and emotion in lifeless things—haunts the entire exhibition: goblet, urn, key, and machine share a solitary exile into objecthood.

At the exhibition titled Millefiori The images in Millefiori come together in a single composition—a mosaic made of a thousand flowers, speaking nonetheless of aloneness