Barnabás Szilágyi
Festő
My painting work focuses on the landscape as a mental construction. I am not interested in the depiction of nature, but in the inner spaces that are built up from layers of memory, desire, lack and uncertainty. The landscapes that appear in my paintings are not topographical places, but unstable, borderless fields where natural forms - trees, plant structures, horizons - lose their original function and become psychic signs. An inner landscape unfolds along the concepts of the garden, then later the road and finally Tartarus, which simultaneously carries the experience of refuge and decay. In these spaces, ruin, non-place and no-man's land are not mere motifs, but organizing principles: visual forms of transience, drift and the dissolution of identity. The often recurring palm tree motif evokes the collective image of the tropical idyll, ironically shifting it towards the space of false promises and unattainable desire. My painting technique is based on the tension between control and chance. I work without references, starting from the material processes of the images: layers of glaze, erasures, drips, scrapes and dissolutions shape the surface. The painting is not born as a preconceived composition, but is formed through the reactions of the material, as it were, building itself. The surface thus does not depict, but records an event – a continuous state of disintegration and reorganization. In my works, darkness, uncertainty and floating are not negative domains, but possibilities for meaning-making. The images function as surfaces of an inner underworld, where decay is not an end point, but a prerequisite for creation. This space, for me, is the romance of the underworld: the acceptance that existence cannot be captured in stable forms, but in continuous transformation.
