Bea Selmeczi:
Fossils of the Future

In his exhibition entitled Anticipated target concepts (Vajda Lajos Studio, Szentendre), Tamás Komoróczky engages in predictions. He simultaneously explores the future and the development of his own personality with its possible tracks. He employs every possible method to achieve this goal: divine intervention (in a theological sense and also in the form of deus ex machina), sorcery, voodoo, and reading from bones and broken tiles.

Three logs of wood cast from plaster are placed on a pedestal in a triangular arrangement, and two shin-bones on another signify the power found in nature that we carry within us, the kindling of the invisible flame of ideas, a symbol for change inherent in permanence or permanence inherent in change.

Komoróczky takes possession of the inherently magical space of the Vajda Lajos Studio with the precision of an archaeologist, and this is how he comes upon the bone outline painted on the ground, which he incorporates into the exhibition material after some restoration. The musty cellar, the Gothic arch and the flaking plaster strikes the visitor as a witches’ kitchen anyway, with some secret recipe boiling in the pot. Naturally, this presentation is just a tool, a medium for Komoróczky, and it does not reflect the genius aesthetics of the Romantic era or Swimburne’s occult art theory; it is just an attitude of exploring artistic and ontological questions by lining up symbols in the service of science.

The puppet-video witches appearing as ghost figures, chanting the prophecy from Macbeth, are an image of humans alarmed by their own dark side (their tyrannical nature, the recurring desire to murder, and then the guilt caused by the desire). Komoróczky invokes supernatural powers (this is what the soothsaying accessories are for), in order to learn whether there is a way for the world and the personality to leave this obsessive circle.

He then seems to put all this in parentheses with the spinning wheel, beside which Lachesis holds the fibre for Clotho, who is spinning the thread of life, which is finally cut by Atropos. The three Moirae not only decide the fates of individuals, but they also set the destiny of the entire Globe. Notwithstanding all the soothsaying, practices and mysteries, fate will overwrite doubts and hopes.

The „forged signature of God” logo, lit by a stroboscope, on the other hand, is beyond the archaic conception of fate, as the mention of higher powers and predestination is a mere refusal to accept responsibility.

There are fossils, some kinds of found objects in the boxes: texts left from Komoróczky’s former exhibitions, an animal horn, a fax machine, VHSs, bones, glass. In one of the boxes padded with old newspapers and straw, there is a porcelain coffee set and theatre masks, a total chaos at first sight. However, everything has its place and meaning. The objects coated with flock have lost their original functions, and their quality has changed. They have become the conserved imprints of old times.

While Komoróczky explores the possible future, he remembers the past, his own past, and objectifies it. By this gesture, he also immediately questions the importance of knowing the future, as if he was producing fossils in advance from answers not even born yet.

Komoróczky defies the fear of the unknown one more time: he goes around it, he touches it, he recoils in fright, he falls on his knees before its majesty, and then he mocks it. After nothing and chaos, he calls fate into question: the order which is possibly more dreadful than nothing and chaos.