Garden (afterimage)
2022


Garden (afterimage), 2022, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, diptych, 155 x 250 cm



A garden is a borderland between order characterising the conquered space and chaos beyond man’s control. It is simultaneously a symbol of nature’s perfection and our absolute power over the nonhuman. The diptych shows a garden ‘abandoned’ several decades ago, which plants, having escaped control, cover with their characteristic rhizomatic expansive structure. The work was inspired by the rhizome metaphor introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is a fundamental metaphor of centreless thinking, whereby human thinking is a part of the world’s proliferating, heterogeneous functioning, in which processes have neither starting points nor beginnings, and they also lack teleology. Furthermore, they do not mirror reality, but rather constitute it. 

The word ‘afterimage’ in the title refers to the optical illusion that appears in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. An afterimage is typically a negative image, in which the colors appear inverted from their original state. Afterimages are often caused by the over-stimulation of certain photoreceptor cells in the eye, resulting in a chemical change in the retinal cells.



Garden (afterimage), 2022, detail, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper



Garden (afterimage), 2022, detail, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper


Garden (afterimage), 2022, detail, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper


“The soil is a medium in which various actors manifest themselves, then disappear. It is a peculiar scene of appearances and retreats, which are pervaded by various rhizomatic roots and vegetal modes of existence. Within this medium rhizomatic arrangements are functioning, making even the apparently deserted areas liveable When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote about the ‘collective arrangements of enunciation’, they thought of the unaware acquirement and transfer of ecological information in the rhizomatic operation. Each plant needs to entirely fill its environment, while it lives unreflected among its own networks and elements. Vegetal existence is also an elementary existence, living together with compounds, climate change and particles. The world itself has a kind of ‘radical aliveness’ which has been ignored far too long by the scientistic worldview operating with dead matter. In order to disseminate their seeds plants make their way to fields. This involves the whole planet in the process of life, starting from invisible underground work, which can be approached by us only with difficulty. Yet, at the same time, by this peculiar shaping of the soil and underground vegetal operation it also connects the depth and invisible layers of the planet with air and the sky via its stems and trunks, thus creating a globally extensive cosmopolitical sphericity, which can be called biosphere.” Text by Márk Horváth 



Garden (afterimage), 2022, installation view: Hypothesis: Everything is Leaf, Robert Capa Contemporary, Budapest, Hungary, 2022