franyo aatoth: Monszun – Mon Sun

EXHIBITION OPENING
VÁRFOK GALLERY
1012 Budapest, Várfok u. 11.
Thursday, 9th. June, 2022 from 19.00 to 21.00

An exhibition of franyo aatoth’s latest works entitled ‘Monszun – Mon Sun’ will open at the Várfok Gallery on the 9th. June, 2022 and run until the 16th. July, 2022. The pictures to be exhibited are the most recent in aatoth’s Far Eastern landscapes series. The installation exhibition captures the experience of the monsoon, a natural phenomenon unknown in Europe, with lush vegetation and colourful, rain-drenched flora and fauna bordered by lakes and rivers. In parallel with the Várfok Gallery exhibition, two galleries in Paris,  Galerie Keller and 55Bellechasse, will also exhibit new works by the artist.

franyo aatoth [Nyíregyháza, 1954] first went to Paris in 1978 with the support of Victor Vasarely, where he was a student at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He subsequently made extended trips to Germany, the Netherlands, United States and North Africa. Although his experiences abroad have been incorporated into his work, the country that has had the greatest influence on his painting is Mongolia, which he first visited in 1989 and defined the ‘Red Period’ of his paintings. The richness of form of his art is reflected in his ready-made objects, his 15-language dictionary for travelling alcoholics [including his Tantric Sildavian language], and by landscapes which combined abstract and calligraphic elements, bringing an expansion to his use of colour.

It was the genre of landscape that reflected the experience of his travels to Mongolia and China. The paintings on show, created in Thailand, are reflections of an intimate coexistence with the natural environment. The natural surroundings of his studio in the jungle become an intrinsic part of his art. His landscapes are not representations of nature in the classical sense, but are part of a meditative, spiritual practice painted in isolation in a monastery in Thailand. They are testimony to the experience of geographical retreat, where the deepest journey can be made without covering a single metre.

The exhibition at the Várfok Gallery, named after the trilingual pun ‘Monszun-Mon Sun’, looks back at the imagery of primordial elements which pervaded earlier times. Water is a source motif and Nature’s hidden pathways are given calligraphic representation. This opens up a new language of form and heralds a new artistic era, leading the visitor into the immediacy of the deep greens and dense violet swirls of the resurgent rainforest.