“...Now ten thousand shapes of Death surround us”
Homer, Ilias
The solo show "Body in the Field" by Zsolt Berszán brings together a wide range of works, created between 2021 and 2022, in various media, from drawings on paper in graphite and permanent marker to drawings on canvas, or large and medium-sized oil paintings.
In this new line of works, Zsolt Berszán abandons the monochrome of black and the black and white combo he has accustomed us over the last ten years of creation and introduces explosive colours, full of incandescent light.
His landscapes are populated by decomposing bodies, human remains and carcasses, bodies in pieces. The subject is the human body abandoned in the field, which reflects the seemingly contradictory idea of being present through the duality of presence-absence. However, everything describes a disintegration and disappearance into nothingness.
The works in this new series can be read through a three-part analysis of the concept of dissolution: through the materiality of the fragmentary body; through the spatiality rendered by its location on vast, torrid summer plains, green spring meadows or bloody twilights; and through how the decomposing body introduces the viewer into this universe of death.
Zsolt Berszán embodies in his works the dissolution of the human body through the prism of the fragment, the body in pieces, and the skeletal carcass. It is the bone that contains within itself a silent past suggesting links to an unimagined future. The bone gives meaning to the transcendence of space and time. His mutilated bodies are outside an individual memory and are the remains of anonymous, collective bodies not linked to the memory of a specific person or experience. Derrida describes this notion of the absence of the presence of the trace as something which cannot be immediately identifiable. ”The concept of the trace is incompatible with the concept of retention of the becoming past of what has been present.”[1]
These bodily traces, disparate human fragments, and dissolving presences may contain meaning in the present. However, they cannot reconstitute what has already been lost; the distance between the "moment of decomposition" and the "moment of actual death" can solely be conceived through interpretation. But these fragments maintain the tension in the viewer's mind due to the physical presence suggested by the imminence of disintegration and, ultimately, disappearance.
The ephemerality of the body is depicted by a series of contortions, eviscerations, and decompositions that create a macabre game in a background immersed in solar plenitude. The vividness of the colours may refer to the hope of reintegration into nature, of fusion and rebirth. Thus, from this perspective, the body trace becomes a metaphor for life and memory.
Curator: Diana Dochia
