Plato is past excited to current Ákos Ezer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Dwelling Room Campout. The Hungarian artist’s signature long-limbed characters, each painted and sculpted, so beloved in Europe and Asia, are lastly coming to New York, geared up with sports activities, tenting and celebration gear and able to train us classes in artwork historical past, politics and social graces.
The brooding European hipsters in Ezer’s works resemble masked actors in Italian commedia dell’arte. But opposite to the type-like Pulcinella and Harlequin, Ezer’s twisted figures, being his personal ever-evolving alter egos, morph and alter roles and personalities from portray to portray. Shy wallflowers flip into the souls of the celebration and trampled losers come out on prime. Golf-playing bullies and charcoal burning carnivores remodel into garden-planting dreamers. Not essentially bearing his characters’ precise semblance, Ezer identifies with their altering dilemmas and private and group predicaments. Apart from, in a world the place the boundaries of freedom of speech are ever-changing, what and who you depict to specific the reality must be equally fluid.
Skilled within the custom of European artwork academies, Ezer ultimately rebelled in opposition to photorealistic appearances and end fetishes, but his cartoony figures and candy-colored surfaces are steeped in centuries of portray custom. The drama of the repeated diagonals and the contorted our bodies squished throughout the image body follows the cues of Caravaggio and different Baroque masters. Whereas androgynous kids concerned in leisurely actions pictured in precarious poses with shiny, typically pastel-like hues harken again to Rococo painters. Propping the sky with a foot in Planting may come proper of Fragonard’s Swing. Watteau’s Pierrot, one other iconic character of the Rococo repertoire, is an apparent prototype for Ezer’s theatrical figures, typically misplaced in thought proper in the midst of the motion. The artist treats portray as leisure, delighting in displaying off his virtuoso brushwork. He freely switches from luxurious, sticky impasto to flatter areas and again once more, whereas always prompting us to query whether or not what we see is an actual world of dreamy youths or an agglomeration of summary shapes and paint strokes of assorted size and thickness.
With their angst and doubts, Ezer’s clumsy characters enjoying sporting, desk prime, thoughts and different sorts of video games, and navigating the altering guidelines in an effort to keep afloat — or just sane — are infinitely relatable. Even their avoidance methods of awkward but balanced crouching whereas smoking, whistling or smelling the grass appear extra like nonviolent motion. Regardless of their existential struggles, these figures reside in a world of vivid colours, sunny landscapes and comfortable, well-lit dwelling rooms geared up with all types of gaming accoutrements and client items. They’re youthful and loveable, endowed with superhuman flexibility that makes them formidable jugglers able to withstanding all types of pressures. Within the phrases of one of many best gamers of all occasions, Michael Jordan: “I’ve failed over and time and again in my life and that’s the reason I succeed.”