Ákos Birkás: "Even if we judge..."

5. April - 9. June 2012. 

 
Photographs from printed media and texts of the most important leftist French political thinkers are the basis for Ákos Birkás’s latest works. The latters are structural elements of the paintings as well.
 
The quotation from Ranciere – as the title of the exhibition – is one of the most topical theme in the art-theoretical discourses. It suggests the debate about the crisis of painting as the context for the exhibition. With this gesture he indirectly  inspires the viewer to analyze the particular works hereby to define their positions. The drawings and paintings of Birkás are offering a dynamic language and position for these all, by their special pictorial structure and their topics.
 
These floating, pervasive texts are sometimes clearly visible on the surface, in other cases they hide under the colour-layers.
Their meaning is sometimes in connection with the themes of the media-photo based pictures, but for the rest they aren’t fit to each other, moreover they also could be controversial.
With this method the artworks can be interpreted on the field of paintig as ironical paraphrase of the new-media genres.
On the other hand the relationship and hierarchy between the text and the picture itself can be an ironical commentar about a traditional theoretical debate concerning their complementary or neutralizing impacts for each other.
But image and text – as a result of their construction and structure – generates new intellectual spaces, reflecting the boundaries and spaces of thinking and representation. It is the point, where the works of Ákos Birkás and the conception of Ranciere meet on several levels,  concerning the division of society and aesthetic system. However there are no confident or stable situations showing up on the paintings. Wether they show politicians’ meeting at an airport, or a student at school, in a classroom speaking in front of a blackboard, or migrating Africans, contingently young painters on their hunkers, Ákos Birkás always creates dynamic situations, where the viewer recognise these situations always as results of debates and arrangements, even if for short and itchy periods.
The works of Birkás – with full of attention and irony – inspire indirectly the audience to define their position in connection with social and artistic scene as well.
 
Translated by Gabriella Czibóka

Supported by NKA