Csoka Szilard Zsolt
In today’s world, humanity lost its connection to what’s called natural. We live under the tyrannical rule of advanced technologies and contemporary ideological trends. As a result, we become unnatural, even false. We became objects and puppets.
This image of man is rendered in my paintings - characters that are easily recognized and identified. That’s a body, but no longer a human. It has no flesh, only shapes, that give us the feeling of alienation and undermine the things that make us human. Instead of skin we have a dry, mask-like cover. It is lifeless and deprived of nerves: it doesn’t hear, it doesn’t speak, it doesn’t see. The gaze doesn’t reflect light, it only absorbs it. It doesn’t confront, just stares blankly. Through the lenses of the fashionable selfies of our age, we stare into a nihilistic inner self: the negative faces, the portraits and the fake smiles. This fake sensation of reality is deaf. Man is absurd - a fashion mannequin, an unrealistic figure.
The ash-grey, the rosy brown colours on the faces, tick hair on the head – a creature that is lifeless, but not yet dead.
The dead are silent. They are veiled under a gracious hiddenness and divine peacefulness. Humans are dull, who can’t hear the deafening noise they make, and can’t see the masks they put on themselves.
The question of life and death doesn’t interest me/ I don’t wish to pursue the question of life and death, because there was never a life here. The ‘here’ is dominated by an infinite materialism: busted background, patches of life every here and there, but no life and no death. Just the nihil.
All of this is captured in the lonely melancholy in the gesture of the "body" taking a stagy photo with their smartphones.
