Constructions of identities and types  of  parallels in the art of Tamas Dezsö
by  Mónika Zsikla
Everything Begins to Float
published by Fotohof & INN SITU
2025

Tamas Dezsö is an internationally acknowledged press and documentary photographer. His photographic volume Notes for an Epilogue, brought out in English by the German publisher Hatje Cantz in 2015, signified an important milestone in his artistic career. He worked on the book’s photographs for nearly six years with the cooperation of journalist Eszter Szablyár, who participated in the project by creating the texts accompanying the images. The pictures reveal the comprehensive nature and painful legacy of east-European social and cultural identity, presenting the effects of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania three decades after his regime was overthrown. Yet the photographs depict not only a location-specific social reality but also a broader east-European identity, in which past and present are in close dialectic relation. Travelling through Romanian villages and towns Tamas Dezsö rendered the mementoes of the gradual transformation of a post-communist society, while documenting natural beauty, ancient traditions, images of deserted industrial landscapes and miserable lives.

Following publication of the photographic volume, the documentarist, photographic perspective in Tamas Dezsö’s art was followed by a quiet and absorbed period of reading philosophy. As a result his new creative period began in 2017. Leaving behind the restlessness of a documentarist photographer pursuing pictures, the stoic contemplation of a researcher desiring to find and create images became characteristic. He was most inspired by global philosophy to create and find images. He focused his interest in modern-age and contemporary theories and not only cognitively, since they also became a comprehensive and diverse reference network in his artistic practice.

Significant changes can be observed in the use of medium in his new creative period. To classify the genre of artworks operating with a multitude of cultural and philosophical references – and reflecting on those – can be mostly characterised by medium diversity. However, Dezsö has still not given up the two-dimensional, more classical picture formats, alongside his installations filling entire and parts of spaces, objects integrating natural formations, readymade and sculptures. In addition to his less frequent small and medium-size works of art, he tends to compose enormous diptychs and triptychs, which he sometimes draws in charcoal, sometimes in pencil or crayon, and sometimes he creates them as conceptual photographs with the help of special resolution cameras. In parallel with the diverse use of medium, his works of art integrating philosophical theories and demonstrating the phases of comprehension can be characterised by prolific diversity, as well as an enormous span with reference to time and scale as regards their themes, since objects involving a large number of scientific, historical and cultural reminiscences turn up in Dezsö’s artworks besides the inspiration of philosophical discourses. That said, in the works of art the various scientific appliances and objects – for example, a 4.6 billion-year-old piece of meteorite, a 19th-century herbaria and some British and French microscope slides – are not only used by the artist merely as objects, but also as symbolically and culturally charged elements. Each is connected to different periods and phases of human knowledge and understanding, and thus they link not only certain timelines but also the questions of philosophy, science and art in Dezsö’s “researcher’s” approach.

The artworks created and executed professionally in this way organically unite centuries of achievements in philosophy, science and imaging (pictorial representation). Furthermore, his wide-ranging use of materials, media and themes approach the philosophical, ecological and social issues of the present in a novel way. Thus Dezsö’s works of art can be interpreted as potential answers in relation to seeking the post-humanist and speculative realist ways forward for post-anthropomorphic approaches, which respond to the most burning problems of the present.

At exhibitions the artworks are mostly presented in spaces resembling wunderkammers, which avoid linear strategies and the traditional approaches of curators. Instead of such applications, they allow us to obtain an insight into the comprehensive nature of Tamas Dezsö’s intellectual universe. His works reveal the extremely exciting interconnections between science and art, as well as past and present, as subjective interpretations.

In the following parts of my study I try to examine with the help of some pairs of notions what philosophical dilemmas and types of parallels have been present in Tamas Dezsö’s art since 2017.

I would first associate two works, the triptych Hedge (2017) and the group of works Variations on the Self (2018–2022), with “personal and vegetal identity” concerning the constructions of identities. Both reflect on the notions of identity from different aspects and their presumed or real human and vegetal nature. Primarily due to the dominance of the anthropocentric world view focusing on the human being, in the history of philosophy vegetal existence was pushed to the periphery of attention for thousands of years. As a result, the vegetal world was classified among organisms of the low(est) grade for a long time. However, due to the shared evolutionary ancestors, there is far more similarity than difference between vegetal and human-animal embryogenesis, ontogenesis and mode of existence. Despite this, philosophers, the representatives of existentialist philosophy and existentialist ontology tended to create the notions of personal identity and the self primarily by concentrating on the emphasis of differences. Unlike the Modern Age thinkers of western philosophy ignoring vegetal ontology, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who conducted prominent botanical research besides his literary activity, was the first to write about the identity and temporality of plants, and their persistence through time. As a philosopher with a holistic view, he regarded botany as essential for the understanding of nature as a whole. He thought that vegetal existence was a power able to create hidden forms, namely plants constantly reinvent their own forms via their growth and propagation. In his book The Metamorphosis of Plantsand his poem The Metamorphosis of the Plants he introduced the principle of vegetal creative power which declared that all the organs of a plant derive from the metamorphosis of an archetypical leaf (Urblatt). He thought this metamorphosis, i.e. the principle of epigenesis, was true for all living organisms, thus for both animals and humans in addition to plants. Although his holistic approach – which was ahead of his time – could not surpass the anthropocentric world view, his writings are important forerunners of contemporary evolutionary theories, such as the theory of metamorphosis associated with the internationally prominent Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, currently doing research in France, which is very significant for Dezsö and others. According to Coccia, the phenomenon of metamorphosis enables the same life to exist in bodies different in space and time. And this connection links all the living and non-living, since wandering in the form of material the particles of the Earth constitute various living and non-living organisms. Bacteria, fungi, plants, animals and even we ourselves are carriers of the same substance. After all, we have the same ancestry and we are all in transitory states, mediatory organs. And perhaps the analysis of vegetal identity has never been so urgent as at present, afflicted as we are by climate and ecological catastrophes.

Not only does Tamas Dezsö’s triptych Hedge (2017) represent the image of a several-hundred-year-old hedge, it also reflects on the issues of vegetal identity, how it is possible that we can talk about the same hedge for centuries while the assemblage of plants consisting of several, mainly yew trees is in constant and continuous renewal. How can the hedge and the plants constituting it remain themselves throughout the continuous metamorphosis if their components are constantly replaced, if their details, their structure and form constantly renew? A single tree can repeat this activity even for several thousand years, and due to their lifetime spanning several human generations, the Druids, for example, regarded yew trees as holy.

The issues of personal (human) identity come to life as stations of transformation and metamorphosis in Tamas Dezsö’s black and white photo series Variations on the Self (2018–2022). The images of the series may still call to mind the artist’s documentarist practice: the frames of the process-based artwork document the stations of carving and then ‘decarving’ a Carrara marble bust. However, beyond the documentarist connotation, the photos of the series in fact show an identity emerging and perishing through time. Dezsö’s friend, the sculptor Gergő Ámmer, sculpted the bust of Ludwig Wittgenstein who is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century with his theses of logic and language philosophy (and of whom there is no commemorative statue anywhere in the world). The sculptor carved on the true-to-life marble bust as long as the block of marble became the miniaturized version of the starting form. The images documenting the physical process represent the temporality in relation to the course of life of humans as they are created from nothing and disappear to nothing, as well as the metaphysical dimensions of a person’s, an identity’s development and disappearance. From Dezsö’s viewpoint all the stations of this process are equally valid, i.e. the transformation for him is a metamorphosis without a zenith.

The black and white series of 42 pictures was inspired by the ideas in the volume of studies Reasons and Persons by British moral philosopher Derek Parfit, who passed away in 2017. Among others, they seek the answer to two key questions: what is a human being and what is a person. The philosopher and, following his ideas, Tamas Dezsö are both concerned with what criteria are required to be able to regard a person as (always) the same over time, despite continuous change. What criteria are required to be able to say that a given person still remains his/her own self, namely is still identical over a certain period of time

With regard to both works of art these issues are connected with the existence of identity(ies) and their nature which is changing over time, but while the triptych format places the image of the Hedge enlarged to a gigantic size on a sacred pedestal, the stages of transformation of personal identity and destruction documented in the 42 photographs are presented by black and white images appearing as mere fragments.

Fundamental ontological differences can be observed between the experiences of time of plants and humans. While the awareness of human existence originates from recognizing the finiteness of life, plants are not aware of their own finiteness, therefore their existence constantly adjusts to the temporal rhythm of their surroundings and obeys their laws. Plants lack self-awareness, thus they commit their existence completely to life – this approach conforms to the ideas attempting to understand vegetal existence philosophically and postulated in Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder, born in Moscow in 1980 and at present a research professor at the University of the Basque Country (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea).

Vegetal timing is regulated by a so-called circadian clock, which acts as a “molecular metronome”, similarly to the timing machinery of human beings and animals, regulating and synchronizing physiological processes. For example, it helps a plant to detect when it is daytime or night. In accordance with the parts of the day, it is also the circadian clock that determines the satisfactory metabolism, growth and flowering of a plant. These rhythms adjust to the changes to the parts of the day and seasons, and are highly important in the operation of ecosystems. However, as a result of global warming, disorder came about in these naturally developing processes (rhythms) which has led to the destabilisation of the ecosystems.

In order to understand vegetal temporality it is vital to examine the role of the circadian clock. Tamas Dezsö’s kinetic installation the Garden of Persistence (2020–2022) presents the invisible molecular metronome, which is responsible for vegetable time perception. Fifteen antique metronomes are standing on the moving surface of a table. Plants from 19th-century herbaria are attached to each pendulum of the metronomes. The combination of the antique metronomes and the herbaria symbolises the fusion of mechanical and organic life. Tamas Dezsö represents the otherwise invisible rhythm of vegetal temporality with the process of communication and synchronisation between the metronomes during the operation of the plant-metronomes. The audiovisual experience produced by the kinetic work of art is in conformity with the philosophical, ethical and methodological approach of the study Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography, written by Anna M. Lawrence, Managing Editor of Academic Publications at Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, and published in 2022.

The alternation of parts of days and seasons in vegetal and human experience of time can be regarded practically as a “collective cross-section”. Over the past two years Dezsö created two-dimensional representations in the format of diptychs dedicated to the four seasons in Tyrol – Tout se met à flotter (summer, 2024), Tout se met à flotter (autumn, 2024), Tout se met à flotter (winter, 2024) and Tout se met à flotter (spring, 2025).

The diptychs representing the seasons render the seasonal proliferation as well as bleakness of forests’ surface vegetation on colour photographs of gigantic sizes. Tamas Dezsö reverses his digital photographs to negatives and as a result, due to the lack of shadows, our perception of space ceases and “tout se met à flotter” (“everything begins to float). The absence of depth perception, the intensity of forms and the lack of horizons compelling perception aims to associate a meaning with the familiar and unfamiliar forms of leaves, fungi and other plants. The inverted colours, hues and contrasts replacing the ancient setting of green background makes the mind relearn. As a result of inversion, the represented places cease to be places and the sight of the forests’ surfaces appearing on the original photographs turn into images of a strange, alien, decentralized and unusually non-hierarchic organisation of vegetative actors. Dezsö’s intention is to confuse human perception and thus draw attention to its deficiencies. Importantly, the consequence of these deficiencies is that for mankind vegetal existence and the ontology of plants occupy a position at the very bottom of intellectual hierarchy, although it is plants which create and continuously make the atmosphere vital for human existence.  

The series Tout se met à flotter [everything begins to float] responds to the realisation of Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, when he is lost in reverie over the root of a chestnut tree and recognizes that he himself is only one of the accessorily existing objects surrounding him. Following his astonishment, his human viewpoint becomes insignificant. His personality dissolves in the infinite multitude of the impersonal, while existence with its disorder, absurdity and nakedness becomes alien.

Tamas Dezsö’s earlier triptych inderwelt (2021–2022) reflects on the ontological experience of human existence. The title inderwelt, intentionally written in lower case, refers to one of the most influential representatives of 20th-century German philosophy, phenomenologist Martin Heidegger’s notion In-der-Welt-sein (Being-in-the-world) and his anthropocentric world view expressed in his Being and Time. 

Opening cosmic perspectives, the triptych represents the experience of being-in-the-world. The focus of the central photograph presents a convex, oval mirror made from a segment of the Campo del Cielo (Field of Sky), a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite, which hit the Earth 6,000 years ago. The contemplating subject/viewer reflected on the absolutely smooth surface of the polished meteorite turns into a being-in-the-world, namely an object to be examined. In Tamas Dezsö’s approach the mirror polished from the meteorite primarily functions as a moral institution, yet simultaneously it is an optical machinery which questions the experience of the relationship between humans and their surrounding world.

Photographs of fairyflies, the smallest insects in the world, are on the two sides of the central image. Fairyflies have lived on Earth for more than a hundred million years and their lifespan is a mere 1-2 days. On the photographs taken of 19th-century microscopic slides the artist presents the structure of the tiny insects, which are imperceptible to the naked eye, in fascinating proximity and enormous size: the segments of their antennae, the fine membranes of their wings.

This type of microscopic and enlarged investigation – when for example the structure of a tiny insect’s body or a segment of a vegetal cell are in focus – not only means merely a technical shift in viewpoint, it also raises deeper philosophical issues. Since these procedures compel us to rethink what “existence” (ontology) means in a world where a significant part of reality is directly invisible to the human eye. The segment placed under the lens of a microscope is presented in an enlarged form and reveals new qualities, which not only extend our knowledge of biology but broaden the boundaries of human perception. According to the phenomenological approach of the outstanding French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the examination of the world enlarged by the microscope redefines the relationship of ontology and biology. From this point of view looking into the microscopic world is not only a scientific gesture, it involves reconfiguring the relationship of the human being and the world on the level of perception. The invisible – namely inaccessible for the human organs of the senses – is also challenging the boundaries of understanding. Therefore, not only new knowledge develops at the intersection of biology and ontology, the concept of cognition and existence is also reinterpreted. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

Dezsö depicts fairyflies floating in the horizonless space recalling a starry sky as if they were guards of the universe. Their representations frame the continuously changing (mirror) image of the subject/object “thrown into the world” on the central photograph. The composition unites cosmic perspectives and inconceivable time lines, and in this way it deliberately creates confusion in the experience of human perception connected to time and space. At this point certain art historical and philosophical theories, for example Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach and Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, 1966 (The Order of Things, 1970) may help clarify how the artist breaks down the boundaries between the visible and the invisible. Foucault thinks that seeing is a means of recognition, yet it also serves the construction of power and knowledge. Dezsö’s works also reflect on this theory, namely that the photographs operating with a technical shift of scale draw attention to the finiteness of human perception.

So Tamas Dezsö’s works of art question not only the ontological boundaries between nature and the human being, but also the metaphysical aspects which concern the position of the human being in the world, as well as its transitory nature and relativity. Besides the analysis of philosophical issues, his artworks are able to highlight the close yet complicated connections between human existence and nature, as well as time and space.

Special attention should be given to those compositions of Tamas Dezsö’s made since 2017 which operate with the means of scale change, confusing human perception. The forest as a motif is frequently a reoccurring element in these works, which for the artist symbolically sums up all the criticism and scepticism concerning the subject of the anthropocentric world view and the limits of human perception. For Dezsö the forest is not only a scene of never-ending dramas but also the location of continuous change, transformation and dynamism. Plants, animals, fungi and other constituents in the communities of forests are in constant metamorphosis – they change from the beginning of their lives to the end, while certain species and individual entities are born and vanish. As has already been mentioned in connection with the Hedge (2017) the human being talks about the same forest over centuries, while it is merely the location that remains a constant factor in connection with a forest.

The diptych Forest (afterimage) (2018) presents details of a forest in two enormous photographs. The flora and fauna in the Azores, the scene of the artwork, had existed in isolation for centuries, therefore it was regarded as a laboratory of natural evolution until the end of the 19th century (Barton, 2015). However, the natural vegetation was gradually overtaken by four species ‘brought in’ by people from Asia and Australia in the past 100-120 years. Pittosporum undulatum (Australian cheesewood), Cryptomeria (Japanese cedar), Dicksonia antarctica (Man fern) and Hedychium gardnerianum (Kahili ginger), which can be seen in the diptych, symbolise the transformation of the natural ecosystem by human beings (Richardson et al., 2000).

The composition responds to the theoretical debates about non-native (invasive) species, which address the fundamental issues of present contemporary ecological and philosophical discourse. Research into the spread of invasive species is increasingly indicating that the ecological changes resulting from human intervention raise not only biological but also philosophical and aesthetic questions (Hobbs & Huenneke, 1992). Invasive species (i.e. organisms that have been deliberately or accidentally introduced by humans into new habitats and spread there, often superseding native species) are a subject not only of biological but also of ethical, philosophical and social scrutiny.

Representing the image of the plant in macrodimension, the diptych Equisetum (2018) plays with the chaos of the scientific concepts of time and thinking. The forerunners of Equisetum (horsetail) developed 400 million years ago, in the fourth period of the Paleozoic Era during the early Devonian period, which began 416 million years ago and ended 359 million years ago. In the following millions of years it dominated the undergrowth, yet some subspecies grew as high as 30 metres, accounting for forests covering huge areas (Tiffney, 2004). Equisetum is regarded as a “living fossil” by science, since they are plants which did not have the ability to flower, and unlike the evolutionary path of most living organisms new forms did not develop during their history. So Equisetum can be interpreted as the symbol of a “standstill”, which reminds us that evolution does not always serve development or progress, rather from time to time viability and survival (Gould, 2002).

But while the large-scale landscapes such as Forest (afterimage) and Equisetum represent an almost incomprehensible broad time of space and evolutionary history for the human eye, the microscopic images, for example the photographs of fairyflies and those from other microscopic slides reveal invisible, tiny worlds which are beyond the limits of human perception. Photographs exposing microdimensions question the reliability of human perception by means of scale change. Photographs taken of mostly 19th-century segments on microscopic slides are not merely scientific documentations but far more visual experiments of thinking, raising issues of perception philosophy. The series such as Segments (2016-2022) and Flesh of Flesh (2019-2023) open up microscopic worlds which cannot be perceived by the naked eye, but due to their scale and structure they are radically different from the domains of usual human perception. All the visual points of reference that would help orientation – background, horizon, proportions and directions – are absent from the pictures and as a result the viewer’s perception is destabilised. This type of perceptive uncertainty results in cognitive confusion: we do not know what we see, how big it is, what material it is made of and where it is going – namely in what world it is situated. Thus the images not only make a hidden reality visible but also retune our relation to perception. They unsettle the dichotomies of familiar and unfamiliar, close and distant, natural and artificial, and thus they drive the viewer to the periphery of two-dimensional understanding. So the sight of the photographs taken from slides is not self-evident. We must again relearn to see – moreover from a non-anthropocentric position.

Tamas Dezsö’s kinetic installation Garden of Persistence sensitively responds to the blurred boundaries between the organic and artificial world. In the artwork old, analogue metronomes and plants of herbaria create a fusion which conducts a dialogue between the machinery precision of measuring time and the biological rhythm of vegetal organisms. The mechanical movement of the metronomes not only presents technical rationality but operates as a kind of symbolic organism, which reacts rhythmically as if it were trying to model the plants’ perception of time. The specific combination of nature and technology simultaneously brings to life the slow, persevering presence of vegetal time and the impossibility of recording it by artificial means.

For his works Dezsö tends to use microscopic slides of organisms which were made before the industrial revolution in the 19th century, at a time when the purity of air still made it possible to observe the microscopic worlds free of pollution. This historical perspective not only explores the connection of nature and industry/technology, it also makes temporal and environmental relations visible, while drawing attention to the effects and consequences of human intervention.

Tamas Dezsö’s latest artwork Ladder (2025) also refers to the relation of nature and human contribution in a similar way. The work collects branches and pieces of bark, which had fallen to the ground, of fifty-two legendary several hundred- or thousand-year-old trees. These trees are situated in various part of the world, often in secret or closed locations. The process of collecting the pieces of wood was able to happen with such global and communal cooperation whereby unknown helpers or friends posted to Budapest the dead pieces of branches and barks from ancient trees of the Earth located in distant parts of the world, or secret locations which were difficult to reach. The organic wooden materials, often embodying sacral, cultural and historical significance, were put together by the artist in the form of a ladder, regarded as the ancient symbol of the endeavour to understand. Ladder suggesting a clean, industrial production simultaneously represents the power of human union, the timelessness of nature and the aesthetic opportunities of organic-artificial engagement.

In summary it can be said that Tamas Dezsö’s art involves sensitive and consistent research into the boundary of visible and invisible. His works explore the limits of human perception, rethinking the relationship with nature, and questions about the notions of time and scale. The enlarged images of microscopic worlds, the installations that follow the slow rhythm of vegetal time, or ensembles of objects made from the oldest trees in the world, which also preserve personal mythologies, all reflect an artistic ambition which translates the scientific and philosophical discourses into a sensitive and visually reflected language. His works of art are not just a display, they also make us uncertain and dislocate us from everything we consider as natural with regard to seeing, perception and knowledge. They offer a perception of the world where what we see is not an illustration of reality but the reflection of a deeper experience of existence. His oeuvre simultaneously raises philosophical questions, while providing a poetic experience and a visual manifestation of contemporary ecological thinking.

Primary works on philosophy and theory

• Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit, Niemeyer.

• Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge.

• Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Gallimard (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences)

• Marder, M. (2013). Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press.

• Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.

• Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum.

• Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Zero Books.

• Hall, M. (2011). Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. SUNY Press.

• Irigaray, L. (2002). The Way of Love. Continuum.

• Goethe, J. W. (1790). Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen. Leipzig: Göschen.

• Böhme, G. (2014). Goethe’s Plant Metamorphosis and Ecological Aesthetics. Springer.

• Munteanu, D. (2012). The Metamorphosis of the Vegetable World: Goethe’s Contribution to Modern Botany. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

• Coccia, E. (2018). The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. University of Minnesota Press.

• Alberro, A., & Stimson, B. (Eds.). (2009). Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. MIT Press.

• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.

• Cavell, S. (2002). Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Blackwell Publishing.

• Hacker, P. M. S. (2001). Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind

Scientific references

• Barton, J. (2015). The Azores: Nature's laboratory. Journal of Island Studies, 13(2), 245-259.

• Gould, S. J. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

• Hobbs, R. J., & Huenneke, L. F. (1992). Disturbance, Diversity, and Invasion: Implications for Conservation. Conservation Biology, 6(3), 324-332.

• Richardson, D. M., et al. (2000). Plant invasions: The role of species, community, and ecosystem processes. Biological Conservation, 96(2), 213-233.

• Tiffney, B. H. (2004). The Evolutionary History of Equisetum: A Review. Evolutionary Ecology Research, 6(4), 1051-1071.

Discourse on art history and ecology

• Danto, A. C. (1992). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Harvard University Press.

• Belting, H. (1994). Image and Artist: A History of Portraiture in the West. University of Chicago Press.

• Greenberg, C. (1961). The Crisis of the Easel Picture. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Beacon Press.

• Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum.

• Zizek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. MIT Press.

• Garrard, G. (2012). Ecocriticism. Routledge.

• Kennedy, J., & Shaw, D. (2017). Ecocriticism and Art: A New Approach to Contemporary Art. Routledge.