Photo, image, artwork - György Jozipovics graphic artist (2022)

Experiences from two large-size works by Ákos Rajnai.

Let me introduce my thoughts on photography, images, artworks, which Ákos Rajnai is very much involved in. But I will not begin with him, but a phenomenon that I have experienced with several photographers. For a long time, I did not understand why photographers turn to painting (There are photographers who take pictures as if they were hyper-realistic paintings, because they are composed like the works of a painter. Or they adjust the otherwise plane experience of perceiving a photograph to the classical fine art view, the solution of which is a thin photographic paper, pasteboard, thin frame, placed in space more elevated from the plane of the wall, similar to painting, with blind-framed canvas, frame).

The essence of the solutions is to elevate the photograph to the values of fine art.

What can be the reason for that?

It just hit me, because there is a natural desire on the part of the artist and the recipient as well to have the works of art seen by all as artworks, masterpieces perhaps, but in any case, to be treated as art. Rightly so. Even if a photo is good, it is not sure to become a work of art. A photograph maps an image of what is in front of it, through the lens or a hole, which is why many people think it cannot achieve the status of artworks. 

Many photographers work through a photographic process, but they create work on a highly intuitive level, spontaneously, more in tune with their instincts, honestly and unpretentiously. The process of grasping intuition and imagination and then creating the image is similar to that of the old master painters. These artists are reaching a level just like the great artists of art history. So there is no difference between them. I could list many Hungarian photographers who work or have worked this way.

The Substance series of Ákos Rajnai reflects all this. 

The size of the image, its surface and the fact that it is on canvas as a medium for emulsion, strongly suggests and indeed it could be a painting, but it is not.

When the viewer looks at it, several things may come to mind, and if the person is close to scientific thinking, they will get the message. The image is made up of points of energy that create matter, and we can see the energy coalescing into metal, and also sense that it is all surrounded by dark matter. If someone wants to visualise how this scientifically defined process works, this image can help.

There is humour and irony in it, because why would anyone think of photographing a small-pitch football goal, especially when they have never had anything to do with football. This irony is something you can slowly come to realise.

So this internal goal is special. 

What does the goal as an internal image mean? 

The goal means that we should step over something, while we suspect that everything on the other side of the goal will be different from this side. We have reached a border that we can only be freely crossed through the goal. We know our old place, we are safe here. But I am very intrigued by the border where this goal stands.

This internal border is very far from the borders of everyday life. It is like the biggest internal border with the dilemma that goes with it. Should I cross or not, what will happen there, am I afraid or will I have the courage to do it, is my curiosity stronger than my fear? These questions are on everyone's mind.

The image of the clothes dryer also brings up an interesting theme, for me it is primarily the desire to purify and the need and possibility of healing, that is, to remove what stains the clothes and the body. Although the photo does not depict washing, but suggests the process, at least the end of it (if someone can go that far). This desire can also be physical healing, because it also necessitates creating a new, pure, healthy attitude which is the basis of healing. But cleansing is not only about the body, it is also about getting rid of habits, persistent dogmas, wrong ideas. So the picture sends the message that it is necessary to get rid of these too.

I have known Ákos Rajnai for almost twenty years and I have seen that he is always looking for the limits that he can reach and go beyond, but he always realised that these limits are not yet significant, so he has to look for another one, and so he stopped what he was doing. But now he has reached a border that cannot be crossed easily. For this reason, these images cannot be improved any further, this is the end, there is no more, but it is also difficult to create new ones afterwards, unless another strong intuitive thought manifests itself.

Because these works were born from a strong intuitive force in the artist that has persisted over the years, and this has helped to deepen the process. The role of the creator is not necessarily to understand what he has created, but to project from within himself (as deeply as possible) what is inside of him. But Ákos Rajnai has realised many things over this long period of time, so he is able to verbalise what has come to the surface.

Now we have before us two masterpieces that few people appreciate in their entirety, but which give something to almost every human quality. To some people it might be that it is something, or maybe not, and maybe it resembles something, but then it does not. To others, it gives value, a creative work and a speciality because it is a work of art. And for many, it triggers imagination and intuition, and also provides a new perspective.  For some people, the image will give the essence.

About Substance series - by Dr. Attila Horányi art historian (2019)

A few years ago, I had to give a lecture on whether every photograph is a picture. Common sense would of course dictate that it obviously is. What kind of a question is that? In doing so it forgets all the devices that can capture light or any range of light, which can produce ‘visuals’ that may not even be visible to the naked eye. However, scientists who study or use light or, more broadly, radiation in their research, and who immediately 'see' these ranges, they often know nothing of the fact that the word 'picture' is not at all self-evident, that not all recorded images are, therefore, also self-evidently pictures. It is clear that some people are fascinated by the complexity of recording light; others by the history or philosophy of images; and others, of course, by the data sets that appear to be images on social media platforms.

While preparing for the lecture, I had to formulate my own response; but before I got that far, I had to contend with my own everyday mind which soon relegated the topic to the annoying mire of superfluous questions. It is not a secret that Ákos Rajnai's pictures are among the works that helped me to feel the gravity of the question. These pictures of Ákos are large-scale works created using photographic processes. These works quite clearly - and literally - represent a possible endpoint of photography and imagery: they are still photographs, and still just images. They are photographs, because they were made with a device and process that captures light: a very simple digital camera with minimal light sensitivity, whose image was projected onto a canvas coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, and then the artist recorded the changes that formed there - that is what we see. And they are pictures as well, because a clothes dryer and a small-pitch football goal are clearly recognisable in them: these are represented by visual means. Meanwhile, they are hardly photographs at all: rather, I would call them minimally informative data sets made with digital tools, "stuck" in an emulsion applied with remarkable contingency, and only a small step away from being seen as mechanical paintings. And they are barely pictures either: although the main lines of the skeletal objects originally depicted stand out as clusters of density points, the ratio of information to noise, with this contingency, is disconcerting. This is exacerbated by the contingency of the 'visuals': the applied technique makes objects appear in 'negative', i.e. almost luminous when illuminated; and the noise removes all spatial relationship and makes the two objects appear to float. The two objects, which are hardly worth mentioning, let alone depicting, are also two (practically) found objects, ready-made, which, unlike the Duchampian antetype, have lost all objectivity. Perhaps this was also the reason for their selection: they are hardly objects at all, more like skeletons; structures in such a way as to structure the image.

Photograph, but barely; image, but barely - mostly a densification and thinning of dots. Ambient landscape where we can walk from point to point, sometimes on marked paths, sometimes unassisted, left to our own devices, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light. This ambient landscape is not necessarily a landscape image, albeit a picture with a frame. Its reduction counters the usual image of our object-laden world. It displays the infinite openness of "almost nothing".

About Contemplative video series - Délia Vékony curator, art historian (2019)

Water and air. Ákos Rajnai takes these two basic elements as point of departure in his Contemplative video series. The two archetypes are symbols of life and that of soul. The videos are timeless, more precisely they are seeking the timeless wonder of existence in our trivial quotidian life. All this by using tools of (contemporary) art in our everydays, however using timeless archetypes, independently from any belief system. The video series is using a centuries long technique of uman soul, the contemplation.

The contemplation, the observation is the peek of practicing meditation. During contemplation one’s self driven by the interests of the practitioner retreats, thus observing the surrounding phenomena in itself and for itself without judgement.

Accordingly these works are not representations. They are not willing to depict the relation between the sublime and the ordinary, they rather “work” as an agent on their viewer. This means that the works draw us into the space in which they exist, instead of representing contemplative states of awerness, they summon them. They work as kind of contemporary mandalas, so they do not represent, but summon a state of mind through which the observer is able to regard the world from the viewpoint of so called “Big Awareness”.

Ákos Rajnai practices this absolutely simple, but possibly the most important “training”, the realization of our own soul’s beauty by using art’s both old and new tools. In the Lakeside video the surface of the water and reflection of the contrail emitted by an airplane presents itself as an abstract painting. At first glance we are not certain of what we see, is it the sky or its reflection? This in itself provokes thoughts, as the mirror and reflection is a recurring question, not only mystical, but also artistic: what is real? Is the image real? Is the reflection in the mirror real? Is it really me in the mirror?

The motive of water reappears in the work titled Restaurant. The camera records the wavy water and the mountains that surrounding it through the window of a lakeside restaurant. It eternalizes the immutability and stability, creating controvery with the wittingly humorous monologue that is heard in the background. The posing couple taking picture on the lakeside counterpoints the Manet-like immobility of the reflecting artist. The artist only pays attention, he absorbs everything without judgement and marvels upon the irony of humanity and the stableness of creation.

Video work titled Attic departs from a Rothko-like image. The glamming blue light might open a door to an unearthly world, which is at your fingerprints from the attic, however the noise of packing keeps us grounded in this world. The racing snowflakes, or the cloud of dust floats in the darkness like the schools of fish known from the oceans, then reappearing for yet another new dance.

The play of the wavy surface and the cavorting fish continues in the work titled Canal, again found as a close-up, abstract composition, not forgetting the buzzing sound of the highway and the cars. The rhythm of the water absorbs the natural flow of air, seeing the wavy water table in itself flips us from superficial viewing, however the artist reaches back again to the artistic tools, as the appearing white spots on the surface of the water can appear to be an artistic intervention. His works are therefore etudes to life, short exercies in order to recognize the being behind the surface.

Essenceless. Duo exhibition, Tünde Újszászi & Ákos Rajnai, Mono Art & Design Gallery, Budapest  - opening speech by Délia Vékony art historian (2016)

Black and white. The exhibited artworks of Tünde and Ákos inspire the art historian to speak with simple sentences and not to speak for too long. However, there is something that we need. While I was looking at their works and contemplating the appropriate tone of language for this opening, I remembered the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which consists of such sentences: “The existence and non-existence of the chair is the reality.”

So the following speech is going to be a collection of associations based on such simple sentences. It is not going to form a coherent monologue that intends to get from one place to another. Such journeys, getting from A to B, departing someplace and arriving to another, are somehow illusions anyway, constructing development, innovation and other forms defined by reason. Let’s begin then, and hope that Wittgenstein will not turn in his grave.

Black and white. Two “un-colours”. Black is the collective colour for everything, while white is an “un-colour”… Interestingly, both are the colours of grief and both are the colours of purity. Both colour are beyond life, everyday life and “the way things are”.

The exhibition is titled Essenceless. This would basically mean that the work of many months - especially if carried out by artists who típically make a fetish of their own creations - is unimportant, which is rather uncommon. Why it it essenceless? What is essenceless?

According to the iterpretation by Tünde and Ákos, the form itself is essenceless, and therefore unimportant. The visible, the portrayed and the comprehensible itself is essenceless. Artworks beyond the world of form. Altough we could assume that is no greater commonplace I could say about an exhibition of abstract works. However, maybe what is displayed in these images is not very abstract, it very much concretely sepics what is beyond the form.

Ákos represents the photograph and the object that is photographed (let’s chew over this word: “photo” and “graph”), in this case the football goal or drying rack, in a manner that disassembled the image itself into pixels, and leaves nothing else but the visual noise to remain as the unit, that is a piece of the visible surface. Objects seen (or not seen) here are actually documents, photos taken in the dark using low-quality digital cameras about objects such asa football goal or a drying rack. So the particles and remains of the visual experience, that appear in our world. Therefore it is absolutely unimportant what the football goal or the drying rack are, since they are the same as any other visible information, a vibration or particle that is represented in our experience in different constellations, manifested as objects, persons, feelings, ideas.

While Ákos deconstructs, Tünde constructs and she breaks white through the black surface “fighting the material”, and attacks large canvases with black in a gesture-like manner. She creates black surfaces with abstract expressionist painting energies, which are actually black spaces with different depths, in some cases allowing the appearance of a little whiteness. The canvases call the viewer closer and closer, and we almost feel sorry that the images have an edge and do not cover the entire exhibition space, in order to allow our entry into this emptiness. The images do not depict or represent, they stand as tools on this route beyond forms.

The world beyond forms hides behind language. The very last sentence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Witthenstein states: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”