Finally, Portraits was the first solo exhibition of the young Cluj based painter Belenyi Szabolcs, hosted by Bazis gallery, a venue which is beginning to build itself a profile as a platform for more or less expressionistic artistic endeavours, presumably highly personal and heartfelt, somehow indifferent towards trends, yet somewhat lacking, at times, serious reflection on the deployed artistic instruments. Being involved in curating the show, I can only reassert here what I’ve already written in the critical text accompanying it.

Thus, I believe that romanticist nostalgias and youthful hubris can be detected in the recent works of Belenyi, as his painting refuses to use both the traditional life model and the photographic images as starting point. Belenyi believes in the creative power of extreme subjectivity, in the expressive forcefulness of the medium of painting and in art’s vocation to approach the grandiose topic of the human soul and individuality. As cliché, obsolete or utopian that might sound or even be, his painterly endeavours are nevertheless almost heroic testimonies of an artistic boldness which is adequately matched by his technical mastery of the medium.

The figures he depicts always look tormented and troubled; they appear as victimized silhouettes stemming from some dark, awkward reveries. Belenyi Szabolcs literally paints people as he remembers them, and he always seems to remember them as ghosts.

text : Bogdan Iacob