Lajos Csonto
1964, Budapest
In addition to traditional graphic and painting techniques, the use of photo, video and installative solutions is typical of his works, since the mid-90s he has been creating works from his own and found images and fragments of text. He experimented a lot with the interpretation of the portrait genre, as well as deals with the possibilities of using archives, the interaction of the digital image and the personal image. He creates conceptual works composed of a peculiar, ironic, sometimes banal mixture of visual and verbal phenomena, delicately highlighting self-contradictions. In his works, poetics merge with an experimental attitude, which is why his works in most cases are multipolar, instinctive and rational at the same time. His works without text are also characterized by this ambivalent effect, the display of contradictory contents.
Lajos Csontó graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1990 and graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts in 2011. Since 1988, he has been a regular participant in Hungarian and international exhibitions, conferences and symposia. He was a participant and organizer of many art colonies and exhibitions, curator and opening person of several exhibitions. He is currently an associate professor at the Institute of Media and Design at the Károly Eszterházy University. His works can be found, among others, in the Ludwig Museum, the Hungarian National Gallery, the MODEM collection in Debrecen, the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre and the Hungarian Photographic Museum. In 2004, the Hungarian Academy in Rome, in 2006 the Budapest Capital - Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris, and in 2017 a scholarship from the Faculty of Arts of MMA won. In 2007 he received the Munkácsy Prize and in 2022 the Pál Rosti Prize.
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He graduated from the Hungarian College of Fine Arts as a graphic artist in 1990. Representative of “sensual conceptualism”, tactility, visual and aesthetic visual elements are equally important to him.
Graphic and painting techniques have become less and less prominent in his creative practice, instead photography, video and text have become dominant, which he forms into installations, spatial elements and complex visual visions. An important feature of his works is enigmaticism, enigma, in which the texts used also play a big role. The images that you associate with the texts are not illustrations, but rather emotional images, just as the dictionaries generate a kind of poetic image in the viewer.
His exhibitions often bring the audience into play by giving them an active role, moving them, confronting them with the dilemmas that arise in the works - the goal is not communication and declaration, but the raising of an open, floating set of questions.
The genre of self-portrait is also very pronounced, appearing again and again from the 80s, as a kind of confrontation, self-analysis, examining and recording the characteristics of the current state of being. They are also interested in the possibilities of using archives: how a creator can relate to past impressions and snapshots created by himself, how to make an image personal and unique. In the artist's collection of tens of thousands of photographs, there are also strange, grotesque, grandiose moments, situations that capture attention, aesthetically exciting or attractive phenomena. A series of conceptual and sensual visual games emerge in these “instant” photos, as metaphors for the conscious and emotional perception of the world.
His most recent works are superimposed multi-layered photographs, the second layer of which can be a drawing, an object, a fragment of text or a material surface with symbolic meaning. Photogram-like prints are meant to address the mystical, intuitive, subconscious part of the individuum.— details from Katalin Kopin's writing.
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