Hajdú, Kinga: Five Paintings: See. Is Aware. Understands. Only watches. Only Sleeps. (1997)

Kinga Hajdú has chosen a genre from the infinite tools of contemporary art that is nowadays considered outmoded: a kind of realistic oil-on-canvas painting, which is mostly related to the Netherlandish tradition. Her genres and subjects are part of the European painting tradition, offering a rich art historical reference. But it is precisely this unproblematic immediacy in what the artist calls ‘commonplaces’ that is confusing, since today they can seem anachronistic. However, Kinga Hajdú, with the themes and motifs she chooses from her micro-environment, builds up a personal world that is unique, one that is also in touch with metaphysics, where the individual elements and images refer to the artist’s concrete reality, but at the same time point beyond it. The starting point for the series displayed is a set of family photographs of everyday scenes in which the infants’ facial expressions are startling, grotesque or exaggerated in relation to the situation. She portrays these babies objectively, with great care, avoiding the trap of sentimentality, in their sublime strangeness and instinct. The tight cropping and the use of light further reinforce the strangeness and expressiveness of the facial expressions, while the patterning that accentuates the plane of the canvas and the dark spots that open it up draw attention to the difference between reality and image, to the painting as a cultural construction.

Krisztina Szipőcs