Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art is pleased to present The Studio of a Death Row Artist, Gábor Pap’s (1991) second solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist's consistently constructed, deeply subjective universe is intimately connected to the Hungarian countryside. Not only his personal experiences and collective stories, but also the (found) objects, agricultural and industrial by-products and natural materials and phenomena that are incorporated into his works derive from this subject. Gábor Pap's creative vision is based on a kind of experiential worldview. With unvarnished honesty, his art reflects on the actualities of subjective and objective experiences, phenomena, news, current political events, visual and artistic trends, empirically perceived and "filtered" through his senses. After being sensually "processed", these materialize first as visual fragments. Then, with the principle of collage-montage, additive composition characteristic of Pap, the translucent, kaleidoscopically swirling fragments without beginning or end are arranged next to each other to form stories of painted images and spatial creations that cross genre and technical boundaries. The patchwork-like weavings, reworked and often joined together within the composition of a single panel, allow the world (the viewer) to experience the traces of the artist's experiences, memories, conflicts, and critical thoughts, transformed into images and material, which are shaped more along the lines of anti-aesthetic principles than of aestheticism intended to please. 

 

The artist's latest works and the pieces presented in the environment of this exhibition are inspired by personal stories and the mysterious artistic activities of Magda Marinkó, a criminal who became notorious in Hungary during the regime change. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he began to paint during his long years in solitary confinement. In the context of Marinkó's story, Gábor Pap was concerned with questions such as what is the most basic impulse that makes a man who will surely spend his remaining years in a cell pick up a paintbrush in such a situation. It is here that the key questions that drive Gábor Pap's painting, art theory and aesthetic thinking really come into play: what, why and for whom does he paint? The artist's experiences of innocent confrontation with the law and punishment overshadowing his past, make the material presented here truly authentic. Crime, guilt and absolution, years spent in solitary confinement, escaping into art in the hope of freedom are the themes of 'The Studio of a Death Row Artist', but also of the fact that, regardless of religion, existential position or vocation, we are all condemned to die. 

 

The "pictures painted within the walls of solitary confinement" are in many ways related to the concept of art brut (raw art) coined by the French informal painter-theorist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). Since the 1940s, art brut has been a common term for valuable marginal artistic expressions created by mentally ill people, visionaries, prisoners or other marginalised, artistically untrained individuals. 

 

However, Gábor Pap's vision has also recreated the imaginary prison cell space itself, the basis of the inspiration, as a site-specific installation in the exhibition space, where visitors enter and find themselves in a completely unusual mixture of inspiration and foreshadowing, vision, imagination and reality. In the fictional space composed of "real objects", associations flow as freely as in the world of fantasy. And the mystery of the impressions can be further enhanced by the (personal) objects that appear in the cell and the imaginary or real stories that are told about them. One such example is the worn-out bed in the corner (Ecce Homo), which was the 'punishment bed' of the artist's grandfather, where his wife had banished him when he was drunk. Or that of the inherited, trans-generational feather pillow lying on the bed, whose decades-old saliva stains the artist sees as imprints of "inherited sin, inherited Hungarianism, national bitterness and inherited alcoholism". Or even the scenic cloud of the kinetic sculpture (Felhőbari) in the middle of the space, which reminds him of the childhood story of having to cover his eyes with the storybook Felhőbari when sex scenes would be shown on TV. Another example is the vulva-shaped, spiked ‘vasfogas’ (hanger-like construction made of iron) or the washstand used by his grandparents with homemade soap and towels. And in the bowl of the washstand, in the water stagnant from soap grated into the rainwater of Öcsöd, floats a childhood laminated photograph of the artist taken before a drawing competition. But the spirit of the place becomes an integral part of the exhibition not only in the form of memories manifested in objects: the flora and fauna of Öcsöd also arrive in the form of greenery in the gallery's kitchen, where in the hours before the opening, soup is made from nettles grown in the artist's garden.

 

Mónika Zsikla