Szurcsik József: Arcadia

After the wars of the 20th century, a declining faith in social utopias resulted in a unique sensibility, which created subjective universes in painting. This tendency is exemplified by the universe of József Szurcsik, whose imaginary paintings are surreal images impregnated with mystic elements to convey sensible messages to the audience. Szurcsik’s themes are dominated by stylised natural formations, isolated natural spaces placed in gigantic, dreamlike perspectives, and sometimes completely independent geometric forms, with the indispensable young faces incorporated.

Arcadia, the title of the exhibition, refers to introspection. The pastoral character of Arcadian life together with its isolation partially explains why it was represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry. Since that time Arcadia has been regarded as the allegory of “Paradise Lost”, referring to the irrevocably lost harmony between men and nature. For Szurcsik, Arcadia represents the nature from which human beings isolated themselves. On the other hand, men’s burning desire for nature, the past and a free world creates an inner conflict. As a result, the contrast between the unregulated natural environment and the constructed world appears either markedly or in a more reconciled manner in different contexts.

Applying an unusual mixture of acrylic and oil, Szurcsik’s art approaches eternity, perpetuality and timelessness from the individual’s perspective. As paint tectonics results in a cracked surface, the overlapping layers and the hardened surface reinforce the artist’s concept.

During his early period in the 1980s, Szurcsik was interested in the relationship of the individual and the power, with his motifs focusing on the problems of oppression and exclusion. Recently, he has turned his attention to the paradox relationship between society and the individual, as the individual can only live in a community, where he is ab ovo lonely, or deliberately isolates himself from his peers. The universality of Szurcsik’s painting stems from his philosophical approach: he projects the status of the individual onto the outside world. The status of the individual is the status of the painter, id est the status of everybody else.