"Zsombor Barakonyi is a STRABAG award-winning painter whose paintings are always based on everyday reality, painting or painting on his signs well-known and less well-known urban spaces, streets and boulevards. However, the artist's aim is not to accurately reproduce the space he depicts, but to capture its atmosphere.
At the University of Fine Arts, Barakonyi was still working in the classical way, painting in acrylic and oil on canvas. In the 2005 exhibition at the Kunsthalle in the Apse Boards and boats installation marked a turning point in his art. In this exhibition, Barakonyi painted various motifs on skateboards and wooden boats, and it was then that he became interested in wood as a material. According to the artist, wood is not as delicate as canvas, so it should not be spared and can even be damaged. This thinking can be seen in his paintings, where the artist first attaches foil with a map, then draws the shapes on it, before carving them out with a blade and applying them to the board with rolled acrylic paint and spray.
His method resembles the manual focus function of a camera - it is not for nothing that Zsombor's 2011 exhibition at the acb Gallery, organized in collaboration with the painter Zbynek Sedlecky, was awarded the Manual Focus title. The artist applies the image to the wood layer by layer, highlighting and enhancing some parts while leaving others in a blur. Zsombor therefore directs the viewer's attention like a film director.
And in recent years, he has increasingly focused on light, which is a dominant motif in his work."
P.Szabó Dénes cultural journalist, sociologist
HU