ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is part of a constant flow – of data, materials and transforming images – that does not permit either hierarchies or clear roles of defined forms.  My pieces propose forms of hybridity, in which no element is fully assimilated within the other.

I operate within distinctly familiar figurative and abstract forms, yet subtly shift their common context to evoke a sense of mystery, and the sublime. At the same time my works interrogate aesthetic models and social constructions of meaning by exploring a sense of abstract liminality, and (in particular cases) by forming a countercurrent  to the ’art object’, that supplies a mass culture desire for content and meaning.

"Csaba Szentesi’s works are essentially fusions of drawings and collages. In the focus of his latest works, we can almost always find the abstract, or even the amorphous, sometimes the non-figurative, but definitely a shape bordering on the geometrical. Szentesi deals with the nature and the many layers of symbols, which can be architectural, abstract consumer emblems, logos or brands, but symbols nonetheless that he presents in his pictures in their bareness, turned upside down and inside out. In his works, Szentesi predominantly uses a black and white or rather a peculiar neutral blue-gray, with a few staggering forms or formations emphasized by different colors and textures against a background that sometimes leans towards documentarism.However, Szentesi’s motifs remain enigmatic both as phenomena and as symbols, that is, they are signs whose well-known form is transformed into the unknown through the image-making process. The origo, or rather the alpha and omega of transformation in Szentesi’s art is geometry, the magical symmetry of lines and sometimes ironically quoted non-figurative art. Szentesi’s repetitive and serial art aims at using a universal visual language and a set of forms that is informed, at the same time, by urban culture, referential postmodern and modernist abstract traditions." Áron Fenyvesi

Some of my works have parallel conceptions of metamorphic possibilities: these installations and drawings are like documentations of a possible afterlife of existing contemporary artworks. I explore the possibilities of cultural discourse by extending them trough the process of unintended use, misunderstanding, mixing and simplification.