Green Area

A city park that became the central topic of the photo-cycle Green Area of the young Hungarian photographer is definitely interesting urban phenomenon. It stands halfway between the natural landscape representing the unlimited and mythic space »outside« and the garden that is the private »fenced« territory, which is a place of the human most intimate affairs form Eden to Getsemanny. The park place transfers a piece of nature into the urban space, or a sort of allusion of the nature, where the symbiosis of flora, fauna and man is mostly represented by walking dogs in the evening. Park delimitates and closes this »piece of nature« but only seemingly as the park is also a public place. The effort to make urban space more natural is in the same time contradicted by the effort to make this nature more »cultural« by creating of rest zones; pavements for inline skaters, play grounds, benches, bowers, neon lamps, sculptures… But in the course of time the works of garden architects are overgrown by vegetations, benches are broken, lamps are not shining anymore. So that the nature »with visit hours« on many places eventually wins.
The photos from the cycle Green Area could be classified somewhere between the landscape, still-life and document, while in fact they are in the so called blind point of genres. Natural, artificial and human is interfering in very bizzare constellations in the Kudász photos. The tree in the colored light becomes the object similar to a stage decoration, while concrete columns of broken park benches on the other hand look like a part of the landscape. Gábor Arion Kudász is fascinated by this formlessness, uncertainty and irresistibility of places originally meant for people but in fact ghostlike and dehumanized. This uncertainty is even more striking in the night shots lighted by lightning or neon. Disquieting exterior still-lives emerging from the mysterious landscape are in fact just cleverly arranged and lighted sections of the small wooded and fenced lot.
Another important motif in the photos of Gábor Arion Kudasz is presence of men. Parks as public spaces with an illusion of privacy in the town become often a refuge for adventurers without money and other night visitors that reconstruct the parks with a temporary architecture of tent camps for one night. Strange loneliness of human and animal figures wandering in the park-forest pulls these places out from city plans and changes them in never-lands. Also in the cycle Tourists in Environment human figures function just like a background of some picturesque painting. The individuals on the photos do not establish any exceptional relations. They are just a mass of people sometimes consistent sometime not flowing through the town. This modern nomads traveling in the limited time of their holidays to the models of the pictures (taking just other pictures with them) are always prepared to climb the top of the famous hill, to stand a queue for tickets to the museum, to organize themselves in the circle when listening to the comments of the guide and to stand for a collective photo. Their physical presence on the place that is outside of their daily experience transforms the natural environment into the Promised Land from the picture postcard and the ordinary people into Sunday visitors walking gently and touching carefully their Arcadia.

Lucia L. Fiserová