Hybrids

  

Bodoni has been known for his wraithlike canvases on the Eastern European mind. His dark and dingy atmosphere is now turned into an ingenious and – literally – ’bright’ essay on medium-specificity in art. The figurative painting that captures three dimensions in two is now enriched by a new, non-planar form of being confined to a paintable plane. The light that regularly has to be mastered on the front now hits from the back.

 

The dawn of modern advertising or the architectural mastery of artificial roof lighting are common motives to lead us through an ’ultra-hygienic’ post-pandemic world, or through the epic, Laocoön-like struggle of modern man with a spectacle-oriented society. But there is something much more accurate to be said.

Bodoni inverts the history of using visual skills to project 3-D compounds on 2-D images by adding them an extra – and unconventional – layer of depth through neon lights, bearers of a striking graphic essentialism. His acrylic canvases are sculpturelike neither for their realism, nor for the informal techniques and heavy impasto, but for using lit-up contours to entertain a more accurate perspective.

 

To rephrase Michael Baxandall’s words, we do not explain pictures, we explain remarks that were formed after seeing them. Bodoni’s newly-faceted synergy of paintings and neon lighting generates a bold variety of remarks formed under impressions motivated by seeing these pictures.

 

text by Deodáth Zuh