Szabó Ádám: Clockwork Paradise
19 September 2007 – 19 October 2007The artistic world of the sculptor and art historian Ádám Szabó (1972-) and the graphic artist Ádám Albert (1975-) is determined by abstract philosophy and accuracy. With their help they build their separate, neoconceptual, pseudo-Eden. The Machine Age inspired their art: enamel works burnt on 850 °C, programmable industrial monitors, corroded steel stumps, digital prints etc. The devices of industrial and postindustrial society. Ádám Szabó bombards our cobwebby concepts formed about time, nature and art with his neoconceptual sculpture projects. As a self-appointed naturopath, he excises the wrong parts from rotten tree trunks and overripe fruits, then fills in the wounds with carved prostheses. He presents the strange experiments on c-prints and animated videoloops. In his works, modern technique (the programmable monitor, the c-print), classic art (gilded picture frame, sculpturesque art) meets the eternal laws of nature (passing, corrosion). A postmodern fight to stop the sand-glass and decay with the aid of the sculptor chisel and digital technique. Ádám Albert sieves his special symbols onto enamel sheets: figure silhouettes, geometrical branches, the construction drawings of electronic devices, palms turned inside out, brain segments etc. He borrows zhe format from the everyday street signs and the taxon boards of the botanical gardens signaling classifications. His pictogram-like emblems – contrary to the original boards – do not direct us in the given system, the pictorial mosaics open mysterious circuits, changing the metropolis and quiet botanical garden to a chaotic jungle. Ádám Albert's reference-lost guides are the sings of the metropolitan jungle and landscaped nature, that is, the confusement of the enlightened world. Stray traffic signs in the lost, artificial-mechanical Paradise.
Gábor Riederart historiancurator of the exhibition
BACK