"The Absence" Painting

Krisztián Tejfel is a Hungarian painter. His works can be found in many private collectors from Hollywood to Taipei city.

Krisztián Tejfel’s painting explores the experience of attention and time through changing relationships with nature and the accelerating rhythm of everyday life.

For Tejfel, nature is not primarily a subject, but the setting for a slower kind of time in which one has the possibility simply to be present.

This experience is also connected to the way his access to the outside world has changed over the years. He grew up in late-socialist Hungary, where access to the outside world was more limited. Following the political transition, this access gradually expanded, until constant access to the outside world became the norm.

​The starting points of his works may be personal memories and impressions, images retained in fragments, feelings, moods, or painterly precedents. When a reference is present, it does not simply transfer onto the canvas: in the process of painting, its original relationships are broken apart and its elements are rearranged. The paintings develop through the accumulation of translucent layers, shifting brushwork, repetition, concealment, and overpainting. Each new intervention responds to what is already present on the surface; earlier states become part of what follows, and the painting gradually establishes its own internal order.

​The resulting pictorial world is not a representation of reality, but a parallel version of it: it begins from the same experiential world, yet operates under different conditions and rhythms. Melancholy and boredom are not depicted subjects, but desired states that allow for a slower, less directed form of attention.