Titled New Disorder, the latest exhibition of paintings by Csaba Kis Róka (1981) at the gallery space of Art Quarter Budapest presents the artist’s newest works. In recent years, Kis Róka has radically relinquished the essentially figurative and narrative painting style that had characterised his art since graduation. His newest paintings are almost completely free of the visual language that had held an ironic, in fact, sarcastic mirror up to the modern European tradition of figurative painting. The artist’s latest paintings are progressive explorations into the possibilities of instinctive gesture painting in the 21 st century.

Csaba Kis Róka’s current exhibition at the AQB will be his first large-scale presentation to give in-depth insight into the transformation of his art that had merely begun at the time of his exhibitions Weltschmerz in 2014 and Expanding Decadence in 2016. By now, Kis Róka has almost completely surrendered his canvases to his painterly instincts, abandoning almost every known type of conscious composition. Although some of his new paintings do feature abstract geometric backgrounds with the purpose of ‘maintaining balance’, even these are parenthesised or put in quotation marks, as are his mutating self-portraits. Kis Róka’s paintings offer neither anecdotal nor moral narrative, nor a lesson, and they are completely devoid of any kind of compositional framing.

Although the universe of Kis Róka’s paintings has fundamentally changed, it is not in the least brighter: in fact, it is more perturbing than ever before. This is owing to the fact, among other things, that even the illusory certainties of ironic narrative and the moral lighthouses of humour have abandoned his paintings, giving way to the total decomposition and liquidation of figures. As Csaba Kis Róka eliminates any and all pictorial evidentiality in his new paintings, New Disorder is the artist’s boldest and most relentless exhibition so far.

http://www.csabakisroka.com

Special thanks to Péter Barta, Dj Crimson, Dr. Marianna Szabó and Csenge Vass