June 26, 2024 - August 30, 2024
Dániel ROHRBÖCK's first solo exhibition at VILTIN Gallery is a selection from the young artist's series made between 2021 and 2024.
ROHRBÖCK's images evoke the typical, vibrant advertising spaces of the urban wilderness. His works mix the visuality of posters and graffiti with avant-garde art forerunners and the world of contemporary urban existence. The paintings of the artist's latest Ripped series initially give an abstract impression. However, on closer inspection, we recognize the many figurative elements and the related narrative, but the tattered surface obscures the complete story. It is like a book with its pages organically stuck together, hiding the original text forever. The story builds from the artist's favorite Japanese comic books with organic gestures, tears, and doodles emerging from the bricks, emphasizing the message between the lines.
The unusual reading direction for the Europeans heightens the exoticism of the Far Eastern imagery and text. The graffiti runs in opposite directions with intrusive typography sympathetic to the sound imitating words in the comics - BOOM!, ROARR!, SPLASH!! (BNW and Hommage series) breaking the right-to-left progression. We want to fill in the missing details of the artist's battered tales, just as we would continue the occasionally broken lines of the scribbles. We feel an inner restoring compulsion, as with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. The images, however, convey the romantic attitude that a ruin is often a more splendid experience than a flawless building, as much as a torso sculpture is sometimes more complete than an intact one. In contrast to the sterile, mute surfaces that irritate graffiti artists, a shabby, tormented wall speaks truth because it speaks of unavoidable change and passing. Now, it does so in a melody that swells with life: the murals echo the voice of nature reclaiming the abandoned buildings in canon. Today's ruins were discovered by graffiti artists searching for undisturbed paintable surfaces long before urbex (urban exploring) came into fashion. Their signature is thus part of the modern ruin experience aesthetics. Just as people recognized the possibility of enjoying the ruins a few hundred years ago, today, celebrating the passing is widespread. ROHRBÖCK's paintings, like the environment around us, are in motion. They commemorate the process where the individual layers piled on each other are a natural noise to the rhythm of the universal mechanism at work in the background.
Dániel Bencs
Dániel ROHRBÖCK (*1997, Budapest) graduated in 2021 from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Pécs. His master was József Bullás. In 2018, he was awarded second prize in the Tolvaly Ernő Painting Prize. In addition to his solo exhibitions in Pécs and Budapest, his works are often included in group exhibitions. His paintings can be found in private collections in Hungary.