Last year, in the summer of 2020, the time people spent at home benefited many artists with such a healthy dose of self-reflection that the need for creation became more and more important. As a result of regular meetings, we tuned ourselves to a higher frequency and began an inspiring, collaborative work together. Many artists gathered to have painting sessions with each other; an integral part of these meetings was to share our opinion about art as well as co-creation. Subsequently, due to the plenty of new creations, a group show representing Bea Kusovszky, Júlia Végh and Dáriusz Gwizdala’s latest works was automatically born. This is how Moon Garden started. Retaining the ars poetica of one of our main inspirations, the former LATARKA Gallery, we did not only create a new exhibition but became an independent art collective. While working together, the most important aspects were caring, understanding each other, experiencing intuition, free, honest self-expression in our harmonic, yet separated world. We built it up together and everybody could have their own part. Our mission is to create a special atmosphere, wherever Moon Garden appears, in order to attract and inspire several artists and visitors to become more and more involved in contemporary art. Our conception can be defined by the words: open-mindedness, dynamics and interdisciplinarity. Moon Garden is going to have several stations and intertwined, different concepts and solutions. Furthermore, we would like to encourage Hungarian and foreign artists sharing a common vision to join us. Our aim is to held lively, influential art exhibitions regularly and connect it to other art events and projects. Diversity, a sense of boundaries between the mediums of art and the creation of a dialogue between domestic and international art are the main goals and principles of the curatorial work. We believe that art is communication and it is a cure for both body and soul.
The first Moon Garden exhibition was held in a beautiful old building, Ady25 Gallery and its wonderful garden in 2020 October. When we first visited the house we were really impressed by the atmosphere of the place, and a novel came to our mind written by Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, for this novel is about time, and the passing of time is one of the most natural phenomena in the world. The protagonist in this story spends 7 years on The Magic Mountain, completely cut off and far away from the world. The main thing that the exhibited artists – Bea Kusovszky, Dáriusz Gwizdala and Júlia Végh – had in common can be the different ways of perceiving reality while making their art, as it can be seen in the novel, in which the wizard chase game with the interchangeable content of the concept of time. He always works with two types of time: the objective, the time measured by the clock and the calendar, and the subjective time, which depends on the emotional content of the objective time and the peculiarities of the soul receiving and processing the experience. Objective time can sometimes speed up, subjective time can slow down, or even stop (for someone). Opposing time experiences do not occur with mechanical predictability. Thomas Mann’s paradoxical idea that perhaps also anchored in psychological truths, is that in certain situations and in certain souls it is not the time crowded with the content of experiences that gives the impression of running fast but on the contrary: the monotonous, uneventful flow of hours, days, weeks and months are the very things that can almost mean the cessation of time in certain situations and in the perception of certain people; its traditional division and rhythm can be transformed and thus even lose its significance. Dealing with the concept of time, in terms of fine arts can lead us to exciting areas and into a completely time-independent dream world. This way, the artists created their inner gardens. One of the poles of perception is abstract art, as an artistic conception representing the objective perception of reality. On the other side, as the pole of subtitle perception, there comes the Surrealism, as an artistic experience above reality, beyond reality.
Bea Kusovszky is a representative of abstract art, whose latest paintings no longer show characters or figures, although she started as a figurative artist, characterized by the usage of the special halftone technique based on classical comics. Her newest paintings reflect harmony and distancing at the same time. The characters disappeared; the paintings are clearly abstract images without actors. She automatically places geometric shapes in certain compositions and puts colours into the certain shapes. During the process of creation the use of colour is based on the contrast of monochrome scales and rainbow colors results in geometric, hard-edge, non-figurative images. The tonal infiltration of light forms temporal and at the same time spatial scalar spherical wave phenomena that she represents with the help of projections created by the intersection of planes. She uses different grades of material on the canvases, for which she cut and paint the images with vector-designed, cutter-made stencils. This is how the dotted surfaces are formed.
She first encountered the moiré effect due to signal interference during analogue video procedures, which is also a phenomenon that occurs during offset procedures. When she started experimenting on the canvases using perforated foils, she noticed that the moiré phenomenon was created in the same way. Following the analogy, she was able to create offset-like stains depicting the effect of crumpled material. In many cases, she also combine the “crumpled” effects with the moiré phenomenon. As a result of the intersection of the dots perforated in parallel and perpendicular rows, the surface begins to pulsate, and the image depth alternates between the two and three dimensions. The sight is created between the layers. Thanks to the optical colour mixing, our eyes can put together exactly what colour the end result would be, from the combination of two or more colours, or from the point of view of the examination.
Interestingly, many of the works in her latest series were inspired by the shimmering light on the metallic surfaces that becomes a rainbow; all of this is best seen on a CD and is done with colours moving perspective to a central point; and they also start from a point. Thus, in case of Bea Kusovszky, there is a starting object that exists in reality: an old CD, from which we got to such an exciting abstraction.
The subjective nature of perception, an artistic attitude above reality, beyond reality, is examined by Júlia Végh. Surrealism was originally a literary trend and was created by Dadaist poets such as Tristan Tzara, and was born from the intertwining of literature, prose and fine arts. Freud’s psychology was the starting point, which was a novelty at the time of its development. Only a few people know that the father of Surrealism, André Breton, served as a soldier (also) saw in hospitals how Freud’s hypnosis was used and how thoughts from the unconscious were able to heal patients who experienced trauma. He translated all this into the language of art, based solely on association. This has inspired a lot of creators, for example René Magritte or even Attila József, Hungarian poet.
According to the main principles of Surrealism, Júlia represents an intuitive creative process. In her paintings, the thick, juicy surfaces are combined with a harmonic colour scheme and internal landscapes emerge in a dreamlike, floating world. The goal is to create her own, intense, distinctive pictorial language. The compositions of impressions perceived in her dreams appear freely by instinctive gestures; thus the image almost shapes itself. This is how Surrealists discover their own inner world again and again.
Through the medium of collage technique, she plays with common motifs and forms that can be filled by new meaning by being transformed, hid or abstracted, becoming a pictorial part of a game of experiencing the random, abstract layers that come to life while the paintings unfold in front of us. While making her new series the subjective internal relationship with nature is of importance, and we can also encounter pictorial motifs of opposite conceptual pairs: space and non-space, sacred and profane.
Following the ideal of L’art pour l’art, the existence of the painting is aesthetic in itself, justified by its beauty and independent from any social convention. It is the artistic self-expression that guides Júlia, whose works also place great emphasis on the random coincidence of things, which puts together seemingly distant elements into a given space and time frame. With her brushstrokes and collages she unshakably tries to bring the unconscious thoughts and emotions to the surface, and this way she guides us into a faraway, distant world of dreams built by distant memories. Perhaps right where Dáriusz Gwizdala is collecting flowers, as this activity and the time spent in nature play really important role in his life…
Dáriusz Gwizdala examines natural phenomena and its changes, as indicated by the transformation, wilting, and the natural progress of plant development. He wants to show the dramatic energies inherent in nature. Sometimes he identifies himself as a sculptor, sometimes as a florist. These two activities work extremely well together in his case. When he entered this special world, all the classical ways of expression turned into a new thing: living together with dead herbs and flowers. His studio and flat became an endless dead jungle quickly, due to the fact that he spend most of his time in outdoor fields, constantly looking for natural treasures.
He creates his installations by going on flower picking tours, and his artworks develop as a series of flowers picked in a row. He tries to follow the natural structures what he experienced outside while mixing and highlighting the variety of the dried herbs. New connections and pairing can boost the flowers’ vividness and made him realize that the natural material itself can lead one’s hands as well. Therefore, it is not a pre-conceived flower-arranging technique but an organically evolving composition that develops during the process of picking and captures the meditation spent during this time, even on a single walk, or on a flower collecting tour together. The result captures the passage of time, since the work of art is constantly changing. Moreover, composing turned into an easy game. This method is a fake hybridization that can refer to those strange and unseen natural spectra that have significantly changed our world.
Dáriusz Gwizdala: „If you open your social platforms you can see plenty of videos about people who have been creating something new: life hacks, experiments, pranks or different forms of art. Almost every type of contents are about sharing the experience, the process of creation. The open progress can become more important than the pieces themselves. It works pretty well in our virtual, Post-Internet Era. Yet, I am still wondering what could have happened in the real world recently, while people have stucked online with their enormous amount of attention? Working with flowers is an opportunity to add new ways of communication beside of contemporary channels. I established my new art project called Kóró Flower Club in 2020. The club is simply the medium that communicates in a creative way in order to re-engage the audience to focus on real-time experience. As a result, we do not forget about real life. The frontiers of art were blurred long time ago. Art leaked into other fields and aspects of life. In our age, reality itself seems to be the next thing to change.”