Speak of the devil

2015 Godot galéria, Ericsson galéria

drMáriás has been engaged in creating paintings from a very special East-European point of view for almost a decade, in which he transposes the heroes of everyday banal and tragic reality and history into the popular and loved artistic forms of modern and contemporary art. Through this very strange, provoking, grotesque, critical, funny and sometimes even bizarr form of expression he mixes the political and social reality with the ideals of beauty commonly admitted by the art history. This way he creates through his personal experience a special East-European history of modern art, in which thanks to the decorative beauty of the Western art traditions the local and global reality seen from here become much more colorful, valuable, up to date and acceptable on one hand, and also weird, suspicious, dramatic and absurd ont he other. Since famous dictators, politicians, celebrities, historical personalities as heroes of the time we live in and the recent history we are influenced by become the subjects of beauty surrounding us. Stalin becomes a modern heroe at the studio of Jackson Pollock, Lenin a pharaoh floating in Matisse’s garden, Trotsky a true victim screaming in Munch’s landscape, Hitler a forgotten lover in Botero’s bedroom or Ceausescu a huge bat in Baselitz’s cave.

In his latest serie drMáriás has been experimenting with the looks of evil. The faces of thieves, robbers, simply suspected, serial killers, cannibals and other who are placed into the studios of famous artists, so that the horror committed and presented by these subjects of paintings would clash with the beauty and harmlessness of the artistic worlds.

Following the agressive propaganda posters and leaflets of the socialist times market economy brought cheap reproductions of everyday decoration to replace them making East-Europeans feel the world of art as their promised lands, peaceful homes of imagination that couldn’t be attacked from outside. But in these paintings the inevitable clash of the two opposite worlds happen and tension rises from picture to picture as they melt into one view.

These paintings present a double vision of the two worlds we live in: on one hand the imaginary, the dreamed and wanted, and the reality of hidden aggression, well-used mimicry of old turned into facially new, utilisation and sugarcoated ideology of interest and profit, where in the view of these artistic-realistic eyeglasses communism, capitalism, pop art, soc art, torture, childlike naivety, absurdity, tragic, fun, good and evil melt into one in a mix that presents the confrontation and complexity of ideals that we live in, that live in and around us, and not only for us but all other too.