Attila Doboviczki:

Thank you for the honorable request,

there are only two ways in which Tamás Komoróczky’s works lend themselves to discussion based on some seemingly unified set of aspects: one of these being his own person, who fills the narrative spaces of the pictural narratives with continuously extending new stories, and it may well be only through him that we can get closer to unraveling the deeper layers of meaning of the individual stories that appear before us. Another conceptual reference point and framework may be the paradigmatic turn referred to as the politics of images, the pictorial turn, or, from the 1990s, the new age of the image.

As regards the latter, the best approach to Tamás Komoróczky’s oeuvre is through cosmologies which attempt to understand the world and explore the causal relations of reality, to unravel deeper meanings and reveal new possible causalities through primarily visual rather than textual constructs. That is, the understanding of reality does not happen by exclusively conceptual means, the text has lost its paradigmatic role, and the phenomena of the world are made tangible through various mediatized forms.
And still, the author is constantly wandering on the borderline of two media, the text and the image in most of the exhibited works. In these pieces, the traditional relationship between the image and the text is inverted: the images are not illustrative, their independent explanatory value is dissolved, while texts – as snippets of text, references, excerpts taken out of context – are incorporated in the works as elements which are important but subordinated from the point of view of the identity of the work.
At the same time, these visual world models are not linked to the traditional conceptual framework centering around representation. Although the habitus and works of the artist bear obvious links to the gnostic traditions, they are still organically connected to the rational, analytic view that became legitimate in artistic procedures with the conceptualist attitude by the sixties and seventies.
This is no longer the artist identity that aims to create a microcosmic model of reality, and nor is it linked to an engineering habitus concerned with the constructivist, analytic dissembling of the objective spectacle and generating different models of reality. It is not even characterized by the experimental attitude that finds the possibility of renewal in the expansion of artistic media. Komoróczky possesses these attitudes at a higher level. His person manifests the figure of a special kind of magician, who creates networks of meanings rather than meanings. Among his tools, equal value is given to ready-made- and assemblage-like collections of objects, objects covered with plush and transubstantiated by the artist, marrow bones from Sunday lunches, neon signs, gesture-like sketches, found images, literary references, audiovisual remixes, films, video works. He is not being archaic with these finds that emphasize temporality, but transposes, transcribes, mediatizes. This is how the archeological finds, ethnographic relics, mythology of archaic stories, the relics of our postindustrial present and everyday objects become corpuses of equal weight.
He first examines each object, visual and textual element thoroughly, and either stores them carefully so that he can fit them in their places at the right moment, or – and this special attitude to the world is the very signature of the artist – he creates unique transcripts, replicas from them, where he also generates time loops and interrelations of thousands of years which reinforce this image of a magician.
Yet in recognizing the world created, regenerated by him, he does not resort to occult explanations. The possible system of relations, the memeplex enables unique logical, historical, iconographic interpretations where the creator acquires a special kind of freedom that he himself restricts. Although this manner of reading is accompanied by the application of a concept of the image that is extended to the extremes, the subjective cosmologies are bounded by a very strict law, namely the law of knowledge.

Actually, the task that the author invites the spectator to is not a simple one; it is an adventure in the history of the image where we can jointly discover the spheres of meaning that constitute the field of Komoróczky’s decade-long research and study. However, there is more to the story: the artist is building a new language, that is, a communication system endowed with linguistic charac teristics, he is offering his own visual canon in the joint understanding of reality. An iconography that only unfolds to the initiates, where everything and everybody is entwined with the ephemeral web of interrelations, and becomes part of Tamás Komoróczky’s cosmology.

This common knowledge, this unique manner of knowing is the most important message of Komoróczky’s works.

Thank you and whole-hearted congratulations!