Steven Balogh: MYSTERY OF LOVE
MYSTERY OF LOVE
An exhibition by STEVEN BALOGH
Hungarian – American multimedia artist
at Gallery MC, 549 W 52 Street, New York, NY.
January 7-February 4, 2023.
Opening reception with book signing:
January 14 2023, 6-8 pm.
…As Balogh states: “My paintings, prints, drawings, photos, performances and three-dimensional artworks are visual representations of chaos… that emotionally, passionately disclose duality’s character.
The turbulence is majestically sublime. Majestic, yes, but somehow horrendous. Terrifying yet respectable; something unpredictable. In this proximity of chaotic turbulence, order dominates the virtue of fluctuation.”
No wonder, then, that Balogh identifies other painters as the originators of chaos, dissolution and magnificence:
The great ‘chaotics’ Bosch, Grünewald, Blake, and Turner, and the 20th century’s turbulence riders Schiele, Pollock and Bacon, appropriated and made chaos acceptable; henceforth domesticating it too… the flow calm yet troubled.
Equating universal chaos with the fluctuation of life, and memory and history (time and space) with turbulence, he says:
“The fluctuation as an even process – (say life) – from time to time turns into chaos, from era to era strikes into turbulence; the chaos and turbu- lence explain themselves in different compositions…”
In “fluctuation,” the artist refers to the “flux” of life, the constant change that is, paradoxically, the only absolute in time and space. The flux can be both flow or, as Balogh indicates, erupt in turbulence:
The paroxysm of turbulence…can be the metaphor of art; the art might be nothing else than formulation of chaos.
Is it a paroxysm like the Big Bang? Or is the by-product of chaos and turbulence the metaphor for art and life that makes whole the matter exploding and scattering onto different paths. This act of making order of the terrible is the gift and obsession of the artist. No matter how incongruous or distasteful it may seem, it is the core of aesthetic cont- emplation and creation in the modern era.
Elsewhere Balogh likens the motive and method for his works as “spiritual and technical interpretations, palimpsest and remixed.” The repur- posing of both materials and substance found in the Ballet series is present as well in Mystery 2016, (Godwin-Ternbach Museum Collection).
So seamless is this composition of disparate, layered images that one is lead to believe it is a montage of images skillfully pieced together. But it is not. It is a single image of trees and unidentifiable elements reflected in a glass circle. As a visual equivalent of a memory, an image of spectral beauty, it is greater than its parts. In its tondo form it suggests a globe filled with colorful and integrated but unfathomable parts.
Like most serious artists, Balogh explores the problem of time and space layers…
/Dr Amy H Winter/
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