arpad polgar photography

transient topography / fleeting gardens

ongoing project since 2018

The prodigy of photography essentially feeds a self-indulgence: to seek possession of the cosmos by harvesting, then hoarding its seeds in our individual pantry of subjectivity. For my own visual explorations, this led to a collector’s fever, driven by the growing fear of forever losing a precious fundamental reminiscence and of being swept away by time, thus centrifugated towards the impossible. A frenzy of appropriation facing out-of-reach immensity converged with my panic of inadequacy, for I would probably retain no more than sparse, disjointed photographic traces, well short of the continuous entropic whole of the world.

So, the fundamental question became how to extract in a single image the monad that could contain the flux of intranquility? How to find any analogy between a flat, amorphous, delimited photographic rendering and the original organic vibrations sensed?

Dissecting the anatomy of a landscape seemed like a promising start. Isn’t landscape a generic representation of nature, isn’t it a fortuitous setting outside of human existence, albeit concurrently the crucible of projections, fears, hopes, nightmares or romantic dreams? By contemplating nature, the delicate soul exults at the spectacle of vastness, at the overflow of random shapes, minute details, changing of lights and colors. To the empathetic eye, the maelstrom of wither and blossom, swirling beyond human existence and understanding, offers a sense of belonging.

I presume that landscape doesn’t exist by itself, but rather epitomizes a mirage formed from the experience, caught by senses and imagination, undulating at the intersection of our inner and outer states. What perchance appears marvelous, may only be an echo the growing self receives from exteriority, from voices of surrounding random creation and death.

Between other multitudes and proper singularity lies a spectrum of reality, stemming from our inbred editing algorithm to apprehend, thus shaping a substitute specular landscape, that will nonetheless stand for the best approximation of the missing rest.

In an attempt to establish a series of works symbolic of that specular view, I shifted iteratively away from mimesis, exploring the fringes of photographic replica, venturing towards a recomposed universe of scattered fragments of nature. Accumulation of discrete moments and patched-together scenes form a reconfigured topography, in which density of textures and structures spread at random, where disorderly stains and particles stimulate the scrutiny of countless fragments, emerging or recedeing beneath a veil of abundance from budding and decomposing vegetation. By seeking the furtive and the multiple, I hoped to seize generic imprints, anatomies or hallucinations of reality, within these reconfigured topographies morphing into evanescent gardens.

mixed technique, variable formats, printed to order only, fine art glossy paper, Epson ultrachrome inks, mounted on aluminium board, wood framing with UV70 anti-reflective glass