The Leipzig based artist’s first solo exhibition at the Chimera-Project marks the beginning of the new cooperation with the gallery and must be seen as another milestone in the artists recent exhibition program at renowned instutions and art festivals such as Off Biennale Budapest (T+U), Xchange Art Week Berlin, HIT Gallery Bratislava, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart (T+U), Vorspiel Transmediale Berlin 2016 (T+U), Kisterem Budapest and soon also at Meetfactory Prague.
Zsolt Miklósvölgyi not only curates the show but also wrote the following accompanying text, that examines Fridvalszkis stringent artistic practice and distinctive aesthetics, carefully developped over the last years and now cumulating in this upcoming solo exhibition:
New, grey, polished chrome surfaces. Gradients, grid landscapes, parametric CAD model nets and the sublime, alien geometry of military aviation. Or, to be more precise: the material ruins of these ideas. They are fragments, scattered details in time and space of a past that failed to manifest, or future that never existed, yet nevertheless evoke feelings of nostalgia. This retrofuturistic frame of mind not only resolves culturally ingrained notions of time, but in the words of Gaston Bachelard, is capable of opening up a space that “contains compressed time within its countless alveoli”.
Mark Fridvalszki’s solo exhibition investigates these peculiar, techno-archaeologically inspired aesthetic codes. Within the imaginary geography of these aesthetics, the desert climate of the Persian Gulf and the molecular spheres of dust, oil and oxidised metal combine with the sterile a engineering phantasies of the dawn of the Computer Age. The works of New, Grey, Polished Chrome aim to combine the apparent discrepancies between the imaginary and the real, the digital and the physical, the bygone and the futuristic, art and technology.
Parallelly, the orders of these patterns, surfaces, and shapes are inspired by a curiosity about the “geometry of the invisible”. These resources are derived not from the inverse of the cultural history of the “visible”, but from utilitarian designs of techniques of “vanishing”, “slinking” and “acceleration”. They are derived, therefore, not from a mold originated from art history’s references of constructivism and of geometric abstraction, but from one that is inspired by industrial design, aerodynamics, and the visual world of early 3D modeling software.
Regarding the use of materials, these images follow a certain aesthetic strategy that aims to irritate or provoke the synthetic phantasy regimes that seemingly dominate contemporary visual culture. In doing so, they propose the notion of new materiality that is highly aware of its digital predeterminations. This visual consciousness is noticeable in the skeuomorph glance of metallic material surfaces imitated by grey-toned xerox prints, as well as in traces of robustness caused by the interference between the digital glitch and the calculated printing error. Just as the “The Ghost of Baghdad” is released from the digital simulacrum of the ‘80s — encapsulated in cast metal as the zenith of “High Technology” for an instant, before submerging into variable phases of the “base material” of the desert — the works of New, Grey, Polished Chrome also mediate between the hygienic space of graphics editing software and rustic, ozone-rich photocopiers, converging at the space of the image and its sensual materiality.
