Levente Bálványos – Repairs

The constructive-concrete artist, trained in sculpture, very soon stepped beyond the realm of round sculpture (that is, classical sculpture) to explore the possibilities of a new formal order: the flat relief. He is concerned with geometric elements and with the relationships between shifting, overlapping planes and spatial cross-sections.  

Bálványos moves along borderlines; in his exhibitions and works, sculptural, architectural, and installation-based solutions merge with tactile, material, and painterly effects, often paired with unexpected, unorthodox approaches in the best sense of the word. As he writes: “I am interested in order, in constructing a minimal system, and in stepping modestly outside of that given system.”  

At the center of the material now on display are flat reliefs from both his early and recent periods, drawing an arc between his initial reliefs—focused on the strict yet at the same time spontaneous relationships between vertical and horizontal elements—and his smaller “wall paintings,” which are composed of four to five (diverse yet internally homogeneous) colored, curved, and amorphous parts, almost organic in character.

Bálványos works with reuse; his pieces are assembled from skirting boards, bits of furniture (for example, the curved quarter of a Thonet chair armrest), found materials, planks, picture-frame fragments, and tinted surfaces.

The simultaneously anthropomorphic and radically abstract, seemingly unstable yet nonetheless stable abstract spatial constructions—worlds of almost floating blocks and spatial images—are tied to the question of what a picture is, and where exactly the fine line between plane and space lies.

The framed relief compositions (or those enclosed in smaller “box-spaces”), at once symmetrical and asymmetrical, or the playful structures “placed” on a black base surface, appear in a situation that imitates an image. The “picture within a picture” solution emerges in one work expanding inward from the plane of the image (beeswax – contour impression). Another proof of this play along the borderline is the improvised “building/sculpture model,” which refers back to space, “the classical framework of artistic self-interpretation.” . .

 

Kriszta Dékei

 

Opening speech: Ármin Tillmann, philosopher

Exhibition dates: September 23 – October 24, 2025, during gallery opening hours.