Soós Tamás (Pécs, 1984)
He starts by monomaniacal boodling: he fills huge canvases with small red, blue, pink and green brush-strokes, short looplike curves or straight line till the whole canvas is covered with several layers of this thick fabric of gestures - a tamed version of gigantic gesture painting. This all-covering fabric of writing is the letter-messaga of non-cultural, non-individual, biological-cellular being, and each point in it is different, infinitely variable in depth as well as in plane and at the same time perfectly even as to rhythm, monotonous like a mumbled prayer. Still - and this is not a contradiction - as a whole it is really beautiful, as pleasant and sooth-ing to look at as a wall-naper or a textile, and this wall-paper effect prevents the onlooker from getting lost in the visual infinity. As a next step, he draws the ordering lines of consciousness into this biological fabric: they may be lines in perspective, horizontal lines, space markers or elements of geometric composition - these lend further force to the fabric and wall-paper effect. After that emerges the third alien element in the pictures: the representation of human figures. Skip-ping a possible intermediata stage, he places something concrete on the abstract surface: an imitation. These haman figures of his have been', so far, schematic, like blocks and grotesque, too, with faces like masks, and yet they are not abstract elements of composition. On the contrary, they bring the cultural-existential sphere into the picture. It is this intended many-layeredness, the tension between the instinctive fabric of gestures, the beautiful surface, the geometrical ordering lines and the metaphorical mode of expression that makes paintings so powerful. And, finally, the objects: the spear, the classicist pedestal, which he also covers with the maniacal f abric of writing and which thus become objects demonstrating postmodern bizarre impossibility. And probably further elements will’come into the picture; our task is to follow with attention how the different elements, the instinctive, the rational and the cultural-metaphorical, vili"get on" together, and what new constellation the artist’s self-expression and the wawe of the new times will produce. Zsuzsa Simon