INTERLUDIUM / Bertalan Varga

The works presented in the 2024 exhibition Please Mind the Doors at Neon Gallery were inspired, among other things, by something entirely ordinary: the rounded-corner windows framed with rubber seals on the doors and windows of Budapest's Metro Line 3. "Inspired" is perhaps not quite the right word. Rather, it was a sudden awareness of a familiar everyday sight that had become almost invisible through constant repetition. The essence of this experience is the realisation that no form exists in complete stillness; every visual perception also implies movement, a state of being in transit.

The exhibition title carries a more subtle meaning, referring to the well-known passage from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

The artist's paintings operate through minute variations in colour and sensation, often at the very threshold of perception. The title is intended to be both ironic and self-ironic, standing in quiet opposition to the increasingly loud, overwhelming and excessive visual culture that surrounds us.

The exhibition also includes works from the ongoing Accidental Structures series, developed since 2013 and combining several formal variations. These include paintings depicting protruding and crumpled surfaces, linear grid structures, and compositions based on a rectangular module, whose diagonals generate triangular and rhomboid forms. Although these works may appear formally distinct, they share the same conceptual focus. They also formed the core of the artist's 2023 exhibition Stones in the Net.

Quoting the artist, Bertalan Varga:

"The title emerged from a complex web of associations. The grids that generate and structure my works are, for me, an obvious metaphor for perception. A net is a tool for capturing the external world, while also representing an archetype of the extension and expansion of the human body, from clothing to spacecraft. The stone is equally associative. In the works based on diagonals and triangular forms, the partially constrained, quasi-kinetic movement and the richness of possible variations reminded me, from the very first piece, of the appearance and imagined movement of trilobites, the three-lobed marine arthropods that became extinct around 252 million years ago. In the works where the grid itself becomes the dominant image, however, the stone is no longer a suggestion of hidden or vanished life but something painfully concrete, as the concealed core beneath the canvas is made of concrete."