Thursday, June 14, 2012

Balint Zsako review on Akimbo


Balint Zsako, untitled (rorschach), ink and watercolour on paper

Luck is a funny thing. It was bad luck when an afternoon fight broke out on Queen West and some guy got punched through one of Katharine Mulherin’s three storefront windows. It was good luck that said dude was standing in front of her general purpose shop (which, she tells me, is soon going to house a museum of her own devising!) instead of next door where a drawing by exhibiting artist Balint Zsako is currently on display. A writer far more talented than me could perhaps make a connection between the surreal interpersonal sexual politics depicted in the assorted drawings inside and the violent street scene, incited by someone (it may be the defenestrator, it may not) harassing some ladies, but I’d rather get lost in the queasily ecstatic imagination of this Budapest-born, Toronto-reared resident of Brooklyn. The colourful nudes who populate his world either penetrate each other so deeply their nervous systems intertwine or trap themselves beyond the reach of human contact through the mediation of intricately constructed mechanisms of wood, wires, and steel – not to mention skulls, tape recorders, and abstract expressionist fields of colour. Each one stands as an allegory for various neuroses or pathologies rendered both fantastical and extreme: a caricature of lust or greed, self-obsession or artistic hubris. In these pervasively wired and techno-fascist times, Zsako is a modern day Bosch to depict our torments.

Read the full article by Terence Dick here.

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