The solo show ‘Traces on the Field’ signed by Zsolt Berszán in the Altes Dampfbad - Säulensaal includes a series of large-format paintings created in the artist's studio in Berlin between 2022 and 2024. The exhibition is an X-ray image of the cut-off, twisted body, which becomes an archive of the concept of residue, the trace, the remainder. Building on the absence/presence binomial, the artist deconstructs the transience of the human body, whose disappearance is emphasized by the barely perceptible remains of successive decompositions. In the economy of the painting, the body is hardly visible and is rather suggested as a macabre game of writhing, twisting, arching and torn fragments.
The creation of Zsolt Berszán’s first 20 (twenty) years of activity was marked by the idea of dissolution, of body fragments which can be perceived as remnants. His often large scale works, whether they are paintings, drawings or sheet metal objects incised with structures in successive layers of black and coloured silicone, refer to notions of “uncanny”, in the Freudian sense, and “abject”, in the sense of Julia Kristeva’s theory of “not me”.
Curator: Diana Dochia, PhD
