Lepel

How can we create a true image of ourselves today? In this question, every word matters — even the “today,” as Miklós Erdély would add. Let us start from the middle. “Today” in this case means the era in which, if Walter Benjamin were alive, the concept of technical reproducibility would likely make him think first of self-representation. Our age is that of mirrors built into phones, the era of self-portraits. We reproduce our faces and body parts endlessly on social media. We have our profiles and silhouettes liked. We look at ourselves through webcams. We continuously record and share the images of our motorized movements, our running data. Our monitoring devices store every gesture; our computer use can be followed as if in a diary. Today.
If we remove this one word, what remains is “How can we create a true image of ourselves?” And immediately we reach the next word: “of ourselves.” Naturally, this must be understood together with “create,” otherwise we get lost among the meanings. If the emphasis were rather on “ourselves,” we would have to consider that nowadays it is increasingly rare for someone else to hold the camera — and even more unimaginable that, for example, a man in a suit would drag a woman dipped in paint across a sheet of paper spread on the floor. But let us draw a veil over the past and emphasize the “create” instead.

In the making of the self-portrait, time can be traced more precisely than ever before. Every self-portrait joins thousands of other portraits of ourselves — which can not only be retrieved but are sometimes brought up by Facebook through an algorithm, even without our asking. The time between portraits condenses, almost cancels itself out. The images are no longer unique portraits but sequences that can be strung together into the moving picture of our lives. Any image made “of ourselves” — whether a painting, a sculpture, or a photogram — cannot be separated from the transformation of technical reproduction, from the continuous shrinking of time embedded in portraits. Yet, in essence, the portrait remains the same as ever: we always age relative to a painting, photograph, sculpture, or imprint made at a certain moment — unlike the case of Dorian Gray.

Speaking of Dorian Gray, we are reminded of a sharp boundary: the boundary between life and death. The difference between an imprint made of the living and a death mask. But with that, we have also finished with the word “ourselves”; “create” remains as an auxiliary verb.

How can we create a true image? This question leads to another: to what extent can an image still be called true? If we create our likeness, how much can it still resemble the vera icon, the “true image,” after which, through a linguistic misunderstanding, Veronica was named? From today’s perspective, perhaps we can only say that we can no longer speak of a true image. Or more precisely: Pauer’s pseudo has already said everything about this.

So from the sentence only one word remains: “how.”
Nóra Szabó’s works are about the how. In the first sense, about uncertainty: how?
A girl lay naked on the floor, spread a rolled-out sheet of paper over herself, and then painted her own body. She did not make an imprint, but with rhythmic arm movements covered herself with paint. She did this many times, perhaps searching for the best image.

The “how” speaks of the arm’s-length of a selfie. Of how it is possible, in an age when technical reproducibility is inescapable, to make a frottage. Of how it is possible to create an image of oneself that is simultaneously visible and invisible — that is, with a single painterly gesture, to conceal and reveal the body.

Nóra Szabó’s images are not mere costumes but could rather be called body masks. They conceal and reveal their creator. In this case, we cannot speak of a true self-portrait, since the result is essentially an abstraction — from the images, we cannot recognize the artist’s actual body. We do not see her face; her figure is blurred. We know who might be behind the images only from the context — the stories. The sequence of revealing and concealing arranges itself into time, yet at once becomes timeless. The same always follows, timelessly.

Thus, in these works, there are always two answers to the “how”: visible and concealed, known and unknowable, within time and beyond time. Such duality is adequate to an era — to today — when a true image is no longer possible. When an imprint can be neither purely erotic nor purely religious, for it would be kitsch. It cannot be merely realistic or solely abstract, for these categories can no longer be understood in the old way. It cannot be individual, nor can it be universal. It cannot be sharply one kind of thing, because we ourselves are no longer like that. Today, there is no other way to create a true image of ourselves.

This might seem to close the thought, as we have returned to the original question. But there is still something else. From Miklós Erdély’s sentence —
let us recall it: “Every word in this sentence is important, even the even” — there remains the even. There is still something more we have forgotten. For we are standing in a catacomb, surrounded by paintings lifted from the ground and displayed upright, unrolled. The painter of the images does not lie on the paper but under it, hidden by it; at first it looks as though she were dead. Yet if we imagine her working, we can know that to paint her legs she must have sat up. And in sitting up, she suddenly becomes alive — for indeed, it could not be otherwise: no one can cast their own death mask.

Looking through the translucent paper, at the boundary between visible and invisible, the body appears both dead and alive. But where does the body end? As far as our arm can still reach? As long as we can swim in one breath? As far as we can still spit? As far as our sight still extends? As long as our voice can still carry?

— Exhibition opening text by József Mélyi (English translation)