Free Your Mind V.02 Painting

ARTIST STATEMENT I express my personal experiences of urban life, as conveyed through my own distinctively characteristic approaches as a painter. My work centres on ’the city as a way of life’. I base my paintings on my own photos, which aim to accentuate the general characteristics – rather than to focus on the unique – and to capture the cosmopolitan quality and peculiar timelessness of urban living. I have developed my own painting technique, which I refer to as ’box painting’. This consists of using a three-dimensional, object-like wooden box as an image medium, and, instead of utilising traditional painting techniques, applying motifs with such tools, as blades, stencilled-masked surfaces, sprays and rubber rollers. The image surface emerges from a superimposition of paint layers, which requires conscious and planned artistic work. The sense of constructedness, which is conveyed by the paintings, adds an alienating effect to the spontaneity of the snapshots used as their basis. My paintings are positioned somewhere between a reality that is direct and one that is magically constructed, conjuring in viewers their own city experiences, and alluding to personal experiences based on shared memories of specific places. The figures that manifest in the city settings are also correspondingly unique, but also familiar in a real or imagined way. My works offer viewers a strikingly unique take on the urban experience. My magically transfigured images draw on the collective memory and the experiences of cosmopolitan city dwellers, presenting viewers with a vision-like cityscape that is both personal and familiar. The personal perspectives – the use of ‘manual focus’ – are mere pointers for viewers, however, based on which I can focus in on my own urban experience. Zsombor Barakonyi DLA