Solo Presentation: Tamás Dezső

 

Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art presents a solo exhibition by Tamás Dezső (b. 1978), a Hungarian visual artist whose practice explores the complex relationship between human and non-human worlds, plant identity, and humanity’s connection to the environment. Working across photography, sculpture, kinetic objects, and installation, and grounded in a strong research-based approach, Dezső engages with the ecological and philosophical questions of the Anthropocene.

 

The booth brings together works from two distinct periods of his career. His landmark photographic series Notes for an Epilogue (2010–2015) forms the starting point — a long-term documentary project developed over nearly six years across Romania. These quiet, elegiac images reveal the layered afterlife of post-communist landscapes through abandoned industrial sites, fading ideologies, and rural environments on the verge of disappearance. The project culminated in the publication of the book Notes for an Epilogue (Hatje Cantz, 2015).

 

Following this period, Dezső underwent a significant shift in his practice, spending several years engaged in philosophical research and reflection. Since 2017, his work has moved toward a more conceptual and experimental approach, where each piece operates as a kind of problematisation — emerging through sensorial encounters with natural and scientific realities, such as the Azorean forest, 19th-century microscope slides, or even kinetic structures like metronomes. From this later period, the presentation includes Tout se met à flotter (winter) (Everything Begins to Float). This diptych depicts the dense growth of forest floor vegetation, captured on color negative photographs. When we look at these images, there are no shadows — and because of this, our usual sense of spatial orientation begins to dissolve. Everything appears to float.

 

Faced with this, perception becomes uncertain. The eye searches for familiar patterns, attempting to assign meaning to the forms it encounters. However, the inverted colors — where greens shift into unexpected hues and light becomes dark — compel the viewer to recalibrate their way of seeing. The depicted environment ceases to function as a “place” in the conventional sense. Instead, it transforms into an ambiguous, almost alien visual field, where plants and forms exist without hierarchy or a fixed center. In this way, the negative image disrupts habitual modes of perception. It reveals the limitations of human vision and points toward a vegetal world that remains largely inaccessible to us — radically different, self-sufficient, and beyond anthropocentric frameworks.