János Korodi

Artist's Statement

As a painter, as well as a human being, I am deeply concerned by the public realm and feel the crucial need to address social issues using different forms of art. Although my main field of painting doesn’t touch social or environmental issues directly, surely it does in an indirect mode – I sometimes engage art and educational projects targeting local or broader communities. I have dealt a lot with architecture and urbanism in my research for my doctorate, as well as the visual aspects of these for my genius loci series.

My earlier painting series
My fur series – symbolizing a kind of ancient act – at the outset, played with the idea of covering, and suffusion of space: instead of showing, it was more about hiding. It has woven a picture of the Maya veil pulled over the world’s face. The paintings were created out of the visual memories of fur patterns used as atavistic protectors, guardians of the spirit, and simple wall-coverings and repeated later in the series of carpet arabesques, in which the surface image replaced emptiness with a man-made motif: an arabesque of the world. A couple of years later, around 2000, the industrial interiors pulled these veils aside, and in these newborn pictures, I have faced nothingness. Although consciously I dealt with the intellectual resources carried by space, since the interiors – in my series of covering reality up to revealing it – were all talking about place, in the sense of a determination, with its natural and metaphysical reality. Viewing it from perspective, my painting oeuvre has looped around the concept of site – as if I am trying to circumnavigate again and again on an already explored field – that imbues my world of thought and feeling towards painting, and through universal arts, my life in general.

My recent work
In my new series my base has progressively transformed – as it has happened in reality: I lost the “ground”. In terms of painting, my focus fell into motion, being nowhere and everywhere. A new concept sprouted to explore the notion of place, non-place, and motion, as mediated through technology. A representation of our virtual world that simulates velocity.

Our current experience, the era of technology has added a horizon of a new kind of matter-less world to our life, the communication and the things that are arising only from virtuality. My new paintings are anonymous landscapes, in that they lack a specified location; they engage the viewer with a moving, ephemeral phase of a vision. The broad gestures quote Abstract Painting, but simultaneously stand for the narrative, the precise elements of a figural picture of motion. The series called Motion Pictures uses Google Streetview as its primary base and unfailing cache.

Please take a look at my website, where you’ll find my visual work in chronological order.