Attila Szucs

Artist Statement

Since the early 90’s I’ve been making traditional oil-canvas paintings. As a starting point, I often use media images, newspaper cut-outs, postcards, film-stills. When painting,

I concentrate on such high density moments, when our everyday experiences and viewing practices become obsolete while decoding. I create empty spaces around the objects of thoughts and figures without defining them in a preconceived notion. It is the distance and the concentrated attention on absence that rules my relationship with painting. What I am most interested in is the search of interpretation of knowing and not-knowing, the way they are able to extinguish one another. I collect inspiration from the rubbish of collective memory, which I then re-interpret through the reality of painting. I attempt to dissolve the already defined and often false structures, and introduce new types of looking in a peculiar formal and compositional levitation, where the paintings’ vacuum-like state partially originates in the loneliness of represented elements, and partially from the transformation of metaphysical into universal.

I was born in Miskolc, Hungary in 1967. Since 1981 I live and work in Budapest.