Dénes Farkas. A Very Small Apotheosis

A Very Small Apotheosis. Dénes Farkas. 06.05.15_30.07.15

Farkas is an artist that willingly embraces potential failure as an essential part of the communicative process, and whose playful attitude towards the fragile and uncertain processes of language, communication and understanding, is both tentative and fearless. His works explore the limits, loops and elusiveness of language, the im-possibilities of translation and the logic of infinite re-translations.

In 2014 Farkas exhibited his project ‘Ars Poetica’, a series of pages featuring text from interviews with poets worldwide, captioning cropped sections of a single photograph. For his new project, ‘A Very Small Apotheosis’, a sequel to his recent works, Farkas begins to mix his older ways of working with the methods he uses for ‘Ars Poetica’.

The artist has deconstructed past interviews with various Spanish philosophers and writers, taking the excerpts and translating them through English and back into Spanish, distancing them from their original, meaningful context. These sentences accompany black and white photographs detailing an ambiguous domestic space. From the combination comes an anonymous but intimate narrative. Absurd, and at points abstract, the narrative is a starting point from which the viewer begins to create a decisive story for themselves.

Pages of a fictional book are framed relatively conservatively, suggesting – at first glance – a comfortable and familiar format of presentation, indicative of the resolute. But within this recognizable frame Farkas offers no answers and claims no truths. The individual pages are elements from which the viewer can begin to play with different narratives – to piece together the meaning of something that potentially might not exist at all.