František Demeter: You are my surroundings now
Intervention in Pálffy Palace
As part of their emancipatory efforts, period neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s
and 1970s experimented with breaking the boundaries of the surface or expanding the classical painting medium into intermedia environments in order to free themselves from the formal demands placed on traditional formats.
Current work is an example of the extension of painting into a spatial installation while critically observing its aesthetics, which in post-war modernist language is discussed as the innate structure of painting. In the interdisciplinary field of contemporary art, Demeter reconstructs his spatial drawings, pigment paintings, and material structures into unique site-specific architectures. However, they are created not only through procedural disassembly of the image format, but also by the author’s continual recycling and recomposition of previous works. In the process of de-aestheticising conventional visual and sensory qualities, the uniqueness of the author’s statement is dissolved, and there is space for the development of possible supersensual qualities of the work. A collage of large-format coloured surfaces was created by layering papers, soaked in epoxy resins into which coloured pigments were poured (cadmium, bone black, Indian
yellow, ultramarine, etc.). These, depending on their quantity or covering power,
make individual substrates and multiple transparencies into layers of translucent
material, in order to create new sensual qualities, “plastic” properties, or a distinctive lustre.
