Mátyás Erményi was born in Budapest in 1992 and graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2017. He currently lives and works in Budapest.
The period since his graduation has been mostly determined by technical and material experiments. His most recent series can be technically characterized as a subtle oscillation between drawing and painting. His compositions are often reminiscent of phase drawings borrowed from the world of cartoon animations, but he also prefers to operate with picture-in-picture editing. He prefers to use raw canvases for his large colourful easel paintings because the unprimed surface gives the acrylic paint an oil pastel-like, graphic effect.
His work is primarily inspired by the aesthetics of Eastern European animated films. For decades, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc region shared animated cartoons which originated from their own country. As a result, several generations in the region grew up with the same cartoon characters and stories, such as the Polish Bolek i Lolek, the famous Krtek (or Mole) drawn by Czech animator Zdeněk Miler, or the tale of the Hungarian fox cub, Vuk. These cartoons were not only abundant in cultural references from the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, but also fundamentally defined the aesthetic experience of several generations in Eastern Europe.
Anthropomorphic, coniferous pine trees are the protagonists of Erményi's latest body of work presented at Double Q Gallery. There is also a subjective thread connected to Ermenyi’s trees in this series, which connects back to the generation of the artist's great-grandparents who once planted these pine trees in the yard of their multi-generational family home. Till today, the artist and his family still sweep the falling needles of these pine treesfrom time to time. The pine trees appearing in the paintings are decorated in an almost festive way; the graceful, dance-like movements of their branches reinforce their anthropomorphic character.
In addition to the compositional principle borrowed from animated sequence drawings, the images also evoke the traditions of European landscape and still life paintings. Ermenyi’s works for this exhibition can be classified into three distinctyet compositionally related groups. The starting point is shapes built from outlines on raw canvas surfaces. Here, the artist leaves the image space around the contoured composition empty and unfilled, as is usual with the sequence drawings of animations. In the second group, the shapes drawn with contour lines come to life saturated with colour, but the artist also works on the spaces around the saturated shapes by filling in the backgrounds with tiny, almost needle-like lines.This gesture is reminiscent of shading and leads to the saturation and animation of the "horror vacui."In the third group of paintings, only a few colours resembling outlines are visible from the monochromatic composition of forms made of dense, needle-like lines.
The simultaneous observation of the three related compositional schemes allows viewers to experience the artist’s process – starting from sketches, through colourful movement, and lastly filling the image spacein the spirit of "horror vacui.” During this process, the needles that previously filled the spaces around the central composition become the protagonists of the foreground. Inthe Soviet era, censorship controlled the region's art and artists who drew cartoon animations could only create freely when they were drawing the backgrounds of the cartoons. The artist studied the visual and compositional world of backgrounds that would come to life in the animated tales of Eastern Europe. In Erményi’s view, the impressions of the Soviet Union and socialist realism can be viewed through these backgrounds, including their dense and melancholic colours, their movement, and their forestlike details which were sometimes composed of geometric elements.
— Mónika Zsikla
