"... The mirror is the true symbol of deceit,
because although it looks as if all the things standig in front of it
would be in the mirror, it is in fact nothing more,
but a baseless, mere appearance.
Moreover, what we put in front of the mirror from the left,
is seen from the right hand,
and in the same way, what is placed on the right side
is turned to the left."
Cesare Ripa: Iconologia
I must start with a confession, I am not Zoltán Balázs Tóth. To continue with another confession, I am Zoltán Balázs Tóth.
With my opening, in a strange and unexpected twist of fate, I am replacing Zoltán Balázs Tóth and his opening, or more precisely, I am interpreting as a very inaccurate double, a corrupted alter ego what I think Balázs might be thinking, although I do not know what he was thinking, since I do not have a written trace of his thoughts, a mirror image. Thus I reflect a surface of thought that I cannot see because I am not able to see it. Thus, at the moment I am neither myself nor Balázs, and therefore both, but on an unknown surface, a non-place. Following the self-reflexive, self-copying, self-reflecting logic of the mirror maze, at the moment Balázs is only partly himself, partly me.
The reason for Balázs's absence is also related to reflection, since he and his wife, his partner in life, or according to an older interpretation, his better half, his reflection are waiting for the coming of a new life, i.e. the reflection of themselves, their genes in the child to be born.
In a certain sense, the present exhibition is a continuation, a reflection in a different aspect, a mirror of the exhibition The Anatomy of Photography organized by Máté Dobokay and Bernadett Grászli in 2019 at the Rómer Flóris Museum of Art and History in Győr. Both exhibitions present the basic elements and essence of photography with exemplary rigour and thoroughness. While the 2019 exhibition revealed a more diverse and mainly contemporary photographic discourse and analysis, the current one is a narrower, more concentrated, but at the same time broader medial thinking.
The present exhibition deals with a single theme, but perhaps the most important problem in photography, and that is the mirror, the mirroring, the copy. It does this by arranging a complete presentation of the most recent work of Dezső Szabó, one of the most important artists of the contemporary Hungarian scene, entitled Copy in a partly contemporary and partly historical context, which selects works by very important artists in Hungarian art history. The exhibition is thus not merely an unfolding and mirror of a problem, but also a presentation of the movement of historical and contemporary contexts rearranging and reframing each other. For we understand a contemporary work better and differently if we do not look at it in itself, but explore its possible contemporary parallels, analogies and historical antecedents, and in turn: the canonized works are given a different dimension, can be re-read in a different horizon between contemporary discourses.
To paraphrase the famous title of Richard Rorty's book ("Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", 1979) photography as an important or perhaps still the most important element of its fluid essence is a mirror of nature.
Seen from the right angle, the whole history of photography seems to be a battlefield in which the two different conceptions of photography, mimetic, reflective and anti-representational are engaged in a bloody struggle. The works in this exhibition take up, evade and undermine the problem in a variety of ways and in sophisticated methods, in a way that is quite obvious, not on the mimetic side, but in a way that uses and exploits the basic metaphor of reflection to the extreme subverting its established meaning.
Here we can see a work that reflects a mirror, the reflection of a recognisable figure, its symmetrical arrangement and in addition the most varied self-reflective processes, the most systematic of which is Dezső Szabó's series Copy, which shows the self-reflective, self-copying characteristics of photography in the purest and most rigorous way without the camera, using only paper, chemicals and light. The other, if you like, more contingent, more personal, more sensual, more amorphous developments of the same theme can be seen in the filtered and then smoothed photographic papers of Máté Dobokay, which in a certain sense are also mirrors and analogies of Simon Hantai's paintings.
In essence mirroring is most closely related to copying. For the mirror duplicates what is placed in front of it. It is an apparently faithful and undistorted image, a copy of reality provided that we believe what we see, the illusion, because what opens up in the mirror is an illusory space, an illusory body, which has no real space, no place, which is intangible. The frame of the mirror like the optics of the photographic apparatus imposes an abstract schema on reality, recreating in image and structure that which has no frame or structure, that which is not an image. It copies something that does not really exist. Copying, mirroring in this case is creation, construction, or in other words, violence on the boundless, fluid and three-dimensional something that is reality.
The majority of the works exhibited, which use and exploit mirrors are tautological in this sense, since photography is inherently an act interested in reflection, in which using mirrors, reflection, representation is akin to an endless spiral, a labyrinth. Mirror in which the mirror reflects that it reflects. The medium closes in on itself, the ways out disappear, only the internal traces, the imprints, the internal reflection remain, that is photography does not show anything else, does not show something, does not represent, that is, does not try to lie, it only shows what it is, its own, in many cases tactile, sensual materiality, its substance. Symmetries and asymmetries which exist only here and now on paper and which have nothing to do with words or meaning, because wrapped up in themselves, referring to themselves, remaining on a purely visual plane they make it impossible, they extinguish our desire for verbal meaning.
The mirror can also be a space for self-awareness and self-improvement, because by reflecting the better half of myself I can remove the sides of myself that I don't like, that are not perfect, that are not symmetrical. For mirror symmetry is the highest degree of orderliness. A crystal structure that is a mirror of nature and not of amorphous, asymmetrical human forms. Mirroring, copying, folding allows, enables the creation of symmetrical and asymmetrical labyrinths.
Mirroring is a place of vertigo, an indestructible mixture and rotation of reality and unreality, reality and illusion.
Rorschach Image provides the anatomy of photography by forming a self-reflexive loop that reflects the diverse creative strategies of photographic reflection, all the while allowing the works to function as mirrors of each other, illuminating each other and themselves over a dizzying horizon of fifty years.
György Cséka Rorschach Image - opening speech
