Kitti Gosztola’s work has long been concerned with nature and ecology. She is at home in a wide range of genres and finds the most appropriate aesthetic form for the subject matter. In 2013, she started to create a series of ink drawings (Right Tree Right Place), where she uses sensitive drawing tools to depict different types of trees. However, these seemingly innocent images, reminiscent of old-fashioned conventional representation, are apparently not perfect trees. Each plant is missing a large piece of its canopy. These gaps are accentuated by a frame made of the material of the tree in question, which follows the contours of the tree and does not completely encircle the picture. The frame bears a small copper plate with the taxonomy of the plant in Latin, which identifies the taxonomic classification of the tree (in this case, the European or edible hazelnut). These trees are not imaginary, perfect representations of the species, but very concrete, portrait-like representations. The gaps are in fact the result of brutal human intervention: they represent trees mutilated by the logic of urban infrastructure. What the viewer sees is the way in which the expansion of civilisation disregards nature in order to make room for a particular pipeline or building at the expense of the trees. The disproportionate and unjustified mutilation of the tree canopy is not simply an aesthetic problem, but almost always leads to the slow destruction of the tree, the erosion of a piece of our environment.
Katalin Timár–József Készman