Ágaskodó / Tiptoe,
oil on canvas
130 x 110 cm
2019

“the flesh (of the world and my own) returns to itself and conforms to itself, […] my body is not only one perceived among others, it is the measurant (mesurant) of all, the Nullpunkt of all the dimensions of the world.”

Mózes Incze’s solo exhibition, featuring works selected mainly from the last three years, can be viewed at the Transylvanian Art Centre in Sfântu Gheorghe from 29 July to 24 September 2022.

Alvó szent / Sleeping Saint,
oil on canvas
100 x 125 cm
2022

Mózes Incze, born in Baraolt, currently living in Isaszeg, near Budapest, is an artist whose bold and unique form universe and brilliant painterly talent have won him great recognition not only in the Carpathian Basin but also internationally. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and art fairs. His awards in the recent years: MMA MMKI [Hungarian Academy of Arts – Art Theory and Methodology Research Institute] creative scholarship (2018), Horváth Prize (2016), New Art Prize (2015). Being an extremely prolific artist, the material of this exhibition is only a fraction of his oeuvre, but it is a representative cross-section of his ars poetica.

Átnéző / Looking trough,
oil on canvas
130 x 140 cm
2021

What strikes the viewer at first glance is the choice of subject matter: the thrownness into life of human body parts in the interlocking fragments of space and time dimensions. Through fragmentation, the narrative of the paintings is not a closed, well-defined structure, but leaves the viewer the freedom of interpretation. They are open works, in the words of Umberto Eco. Just as different space and time zones can slip into each other, they are also open to the viewer, transcending the trap of self-purpose. This allows us to enter the painting, to feel like being a part of it, to feel that it is also about us. The daring association of pictorial elements is not interpreted as a petrified gesture, but precisely through the dynamics of permeability, they suggest constant change. Through them, the continuity and dynamics of the one’s own identity also becomes a question for the viewer. The constantly moving, expanding, contracting, interlocking, confluent worlds, dimensions of space and time provide the dynamics of the experience of the present time.

Felnéző / Looking Up,
oil on canvas
35 x 20 cm
2022

Fragmentation becomes a unity in the viewer’s eyes as, precisely because nothing is closed, it offers a rich range of interpretive possibilities and freedom: the intermediate third dimension – in Merleau-Ponty’s words – that can be achieved through the concepts of structure and Gestalt, the extension that takes effect in the dismantling of traditional contexts and allows for dynamic transformation, spontaneous formation. It is due to this spontaneity that the works of Mózes Incze become direct and accessible.

Fish'nMessage,
oil on canvas
50 x 55 cm
2022

The motif of the ribbon is a distinctive feature of the compositional structure of the paintings. The ribbon appears as an element that separates and connects worlds, spaces and times. It frames, delimits, dismantles, but also liberates or chains if necessary. Through it, the pieces of space and time slices are linked together in a large composition. Through it, the work of art becomes fragmented but at the same time a unified whole. This way of seeing the world captures the essence of a post-structuralist or phenomenological body image and perception of the world through the means of visuality.

Human story,
oil on canvas
110 x 130 cm
2019

In the European tradition, the attitude towards the body is fundamentally contradictory. Modernity has decontextualised both the artwork and the human body, making them a closed entity. From the 1970s onwards, both post-structuralist literature and the postmodern worldview have highlighted the interchangeability of parts of the world around us, and thus we live in an era of changing parameters, space and time dimensions. Consequently, the notion of corporeality (the gap between body and spirit) in the Greco-Christian, Cartesian tradition is dissolving, its parameters are changing, borderline cases, situations that break the rules are coming to the fore, the autocracy of Cartesian dualism is broken.

Incomplete,
oil on canvas
30 x 50 cm
2021

Mózes Incze’s borderline cases of corporeality are the borderline cases of the instinctive being, the animal residing in us, determined by and trying to adapt to technology, which assemble themselves from pieces in the viewer’s eyes. “Man is a mirror for man. Mirrors are the instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another and another into myself” – Merleau-Ponty writes in his work entitled Eye and Mind. In the magic of this continuous transformation, the body can always only exist in the present, never in the past or the future. That is why our relation to the body becomes a history not so much of its representations as of its modes of construction.

Kettős érintés / Double Touch,
oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm
2020

Mózes Incze’s frequent and recurrent motifs are hands or their accessories: gloves, rings. It is no coincidence, since it is our hands that allow us to work, to actively shape the world around us, to create. The act of creation is the ultimate gesture of self-expression. The etymology of the word gesture encompasses the meaning of forming, creating, revealing. The symbolic power, the poetry of the gestures of the hand go beyond the mere limits of techné. In this sense, the hand has a special role as compared to the other parts of the body. Touch is all-encompassing, Levinas says that one sees and hears as one touches. Touch enables a basic experience that precedes rationality. It is through our hands that the visible forms of our intentions are created, and thus our hands and body become the basic condition for our expression in the world.

Létrészlet / Piece of Existence,
oil on canvas
20 x 40 cm
2022

The artist’s choice of subject matter is rooted mainly in the European past, but constantly reflects on the present. His painting style is organically linked to this, which, thanks to a high degree of knowledge of traditional painting techniques, easily allows him to reinterpret the great values of the classical painting tradition and to incorporate them into the art of the present with the tools of contemporary visuality.

Létrészlet / Piece of Existence,
oil on canvas
20 x 60 cm
2022

In his universe of motifs, the objects of our everyday lives appear more and more emphatically. For example, plastic bags, boxes: we meet them every day, we store things in them. In this case, they are the boxes of our desires and memories, we long for them, but at the same time we carry them around as a burden. In the works of Mózes Incze, these elements are mainly the packaged fragments of the blue sky, of idealized landscape, fragments of a lost, undiscovered or perhaps just an imagined paradise. The spaces confined in boxes, aquariums, the frozen timelines are the play of dimensions of the world that cannot be known or rationally delimited, a dialectic of our everyday joys and torments that gives us the experience of our present.

Még várok / Still Waiting,
oil on canvas
80 x 70 cm
2022

Pronounced motifs on the canvas are the details of technical devices, telephone chargers and extension cords which enmesh and regulate our lives, and which in their own way also play the role of the ribbon. They are symbols of the passage into a virtual world, the crutches, prostheses of our everyday lives. They are the fault lines of the boundaries of organic, natural existence, the connections with the world of technology and the machine. The question is, do they offer us freedom or shackles?

Megfigyelő / Observer,
oil on canvas
130 x 140 cm
2020

The extension of the dimension of human existence in another direction is explored in a very suggestive way in his works In Quarantine and The King of Silence, which touch the boundaries of the great regnum of the animal, instinctual world. In both paintings, the eyes of the protagonists, the chimpanzee and the owl, radiate an intelligence rarely found in human figures, who either close their eyes or avoid the viewer’s gaze, surrendering to existence with a kind of melancholy passivity. Is it our instinct-dominated, animalistic selves, which we quarantine and shackle, that can offer us a real experience of the world? The owl of The King of Silence, also known as the symbol of rationality in the European tradition, perches on the skull, the great symbol of vanitas paintings. Is it perhaps the symbol of the futility of our rationality?

Megtalált részlet / Found Detail,
oil on canvas
30 x 20 cm
2022

The depictions of people chained among prostheses give the atmosphere of a kind of hospital, laboratory experiment. They are also visual formulations of border violations, transgressions, expressions of the perpetual dissatisfactions of human existence, of always wanting more at all costs.

His use of colour builds on the dialectic of warm–cold contrasts. The presence of blue patches, which breaks the dominance of earth tones, the contrast between the juxtaposition of minutely elaborated and exaggerated details, reinforce the primacy of visuality over thought. In this way, the works become accessible to a public whose members are not familiar with their intellectual and cultural background, thus emerging from a local, narrow sphere and becoming internationally valuable.

Ringató / Rocking,
oil on canvas
60 x 70 cm
2021

Should be now,
oil on canvas
80 x 70 cm
2018

Space Ribbon,
oil on canvas
30 x 20 cm
2022

Szélfújta / Blown by the Wind,
oil on canvas
70 x 110 cm
2022

Térkendő / Spacecloth,
oil on canvas
80 x 210 cm
2022

Vezérvonal / Guide Line,
oil on canvas
125 x 100 cm
2022