NEW YORK Series
Gábor Martos
PERSPECTIVES ON ART
on Csaba Szegedi’s American pictures
translated by ALAN CAMPBELL
“The discovery of perspective permitted to see directly as in reality, how far objects are from the viewer and each other,” wrote Danto of Brunelleschi’s invention, already quoted in the introduction. On his American pictures, Csaba Szegedi, who has a deep commitment to spatial representation, in a sense follows the route of that old Italian master, but the other way round: he gradually “flattens” the three-dimensional spaces of New York into two-dimensional areas of colour. As he puts it himself: “Abstraction permits the painting (basically coloured paint applied to the image surface under a certain system) to take shape in accordance with the creative process and its own laws. When the image as image takes form, the free associations and impressive and expressive effects it generates are rooted in the structure of the composition.” Szegedi is therefore not interested in an ever-more-perfect rendition of the real view (although he could certainly paint that too), but in the “image as image”, the “structure of the composition”, i.e. in art...