‘I thought I could describe a state;
make a map of sorrow.
Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state
but a process.
It needs not a map but a history.’
(C. S. Lewis)2
Réka Kaszás makes her panel paintings using traditional painting techniques. Landscape painting occupies a prominent place in her art; however, she does not seek to visually reproduce the landscape but rather to create a new pictorial system in which she can rearrange directly observed reality. She conducted research in several directions beyond the traditional pictorial representation of the landscape in order to find contemporary approaches to the genre. Her creative method is characterised by the meeting of observation-based analytical painting and an attitude of reduction and abstraction. She has been thinking in systems since the beginning of her career; therefore, in her earlier series, she always examined nature and the man-made, built environment in their mutual interaction. In the series Variety, she represented man-made constructions as abstract forms, juxtaposing them with organic forms taken from nature, such as clouds. In the series Dissolved Reality, she allowed the paint to run and constructed or, in some cases, deconstructed the image using the material’s free movement. Her aim is not to replicate observed reality accurately but much rather to experience the landscape and to observe the moment and the location; as she put it, in this way ‘the landscape also passes through me’ during the creative process.
Paraphrasing Ernst H. Gombrich, Zoltán Somhegyi writes the following in his volume of essays on the genre of landscape painting and its contemporary possibilities: ‘landscape painting does not actually exist, only landscapes do’. He then raises extremely useful questions concerning the genre, such as: what needs to appear in a painting for us to consider it a landscape? Somhegyi provides a thorough overview of the possible ways in which this genre can branch off, so these ideas are definitely helpful in analysing Réka Kaszás’s paintings. The contemporary interpretation of Kaszás’s landscapes is made possible by the very fact that the elements taken from the landscape or resembling land scapes constitute only a part of the painting as a whole. In other words, they assume the role of motifs as elements of the genre, taking the place of internal recollections.
The paintings the artist made for the present exhibition are constructed from several layers. The first one is a layer of gestural painting. The opaque, semi-opaque and translucent layers of acrylic paint applied to the white can vas provide a kind of free, emotionally charged painterly foundation. Then, us ing opaque acrylic paint of a uniform colour and consistency, the artist paints around this gestural layer with great precision. In this way, the gesture itself is placed in the role of a citation, while also creating the effect that it is emerg ing from this monochrome ground. The size of the gesture is also significant: it carries meaning for the artist because it indicates the area that ‘she can encompass in a single movement’. Added as a third layer on top of the gesture, or rather coming to the surface from within it, is a delicate representational layer executed in oil paint: it can be a landscape with clearly recognisable de tails, an expansive sky with lamps by a country road, or a section of a city with houses and a bridge appearing from behind trees. It can also be an art-historical paraphrase (for example, a detail from a painting by Károly Markó), or the si multaneous presence of specific landscapea elements and living beings, such as a cat, the figure of a Venetian gondolier and an identifiable section of a gate. At the same time, the landscape that emerges in the field represented by the gesture functions much more as a pictorial element assisting recollection than as an independent visual subject.
The deliberate construction of these paintings also helps us to understand the nature of thought processes and assists in processing the past by visually evoking memory images. As the layers are built upon one another in the paint ing – i.e. as the artist opens a ‘window’ in the gesture, thus revealing a figurative pictorial field – we can also awaken our memories from a place we imagine as an abstract field where we store them, and where they lie dormant. The choice of colours is also deliberate, since the gestural field, or colour movement, is composed of several colours, lending it an almost psychedelic intensity, with each of them referring separately to the part of the brain from which we recall our memory images. Thus, the analytical, synthesising and abstracting levels of brain function are all revealed in Réka Kaszás’s latest paintings.
The title of the exhibition, Forms of Absence, equally refers to the formal solutions, the content elements of the paintings and the artist’s personal in spiration. In Kaszás’s most recent paintings, absence is not merely physical but also means the acceptance of a new situation in life. Thus, the landscapes that previously filled the entire canvas are now details of a landscape flashing up in a gestural field, obscuring part of the gesture but losing their own full extent. In this way, they also become flashes in terms of their content: frag ments of landscapes that we think we recognise but we have to make do with the experience of recognition rather than identifying them precisely because of their fragmented nature.
The artist made her latest paintings for this exhibition in order to explore the theme of absence. In the motto chosen for this text, C. S. Lewis speaks of describing a process in connection with understanding grief; similarly, these paintings by Réka Kaszás dissolve, as a kind of descriptive process, the memory images contained in pictorial signs and help us to internalise them.
Mária Kondor-Szilágyi, curator
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Building on the ideas of Daniel Arasse, the 2026 Frissen Exhibition explores the Renaissance thesis that a work of art inevitably reflects the individuality of its creator. Although the death of painting has been predicted many times—both since the advent of photography and from the perspective of critiques of capitalism—the genre has always been revitalized and strengthened through aesthetic and social self-reflection. The Műcsarnok’s seventh exhibition in the “one artist—one room—one curator” series seeks to answer the question of why artists paint today. This collection of personal exhibitions showcases the diversity of the profession through the latest abstract and figurative works by six Hungarian contemporary painters, brought directly from their studios.
Artist-curator pairs: Ákos Bánki and Szilvia Reischl, Réka Kaszás and Mária Kondor-Szilágyi, Gábor Király and Gréta Garami, Kati Könyv and Réka Fazakas, Tamás Menyhárt and Zoltán Rockenbauer, Kata Verebics and Anna Blanka Nagy