Gábor Arion Kudász – The Attic [Bogi] from Middle series (2005-2011)

There are critiques to be made here but I’ll not be making them since they don’t interest me.

Instead, I would like to point out how much this work diverges from Kudász’s early work which can really only be described as aggressively formal. And by that I mean it’s all very thoughtful features lucid clear conceptualization and technical accomplishment.

It also reeks of a self-conscious fine art photographic raison d’etre.

Middle is almost playful. Yes, it continues to evince top shelf skill–I’m still reeling from this exquisite image of a child (eyes closed) hiding behind a glass faced door, leaning up against a textured wall in a courtyard.

But there’s also whimsy: a picture featuring a woman standing in the middle of dense brush holding a chainsaw–naked except for work goggles and her jeans and knickers pulled down around her ankles; another picture of a presumably partially disrobed woman sitting on a chair in a field, a naked man stands over her framing her through a camera that blocks his face–the woman tracing the index and middle finger of her right hand upward along the inside of the man’s left thigh.

It’s all ultimately flawed–but it’s as if the flaws are the cracks that allow a sense of life to get into the work. And much of the life is the result of the pithy, clear eyed notes extracted from the diary of Kudász‘s wife which presented as a time line corresponding to the images, contextualize them in the stream of day-to-day family exigencies.