Access is off the beaten track

Access Is off the Beaten Track
(Patrik Steinhauser)

Life unfolds as in a shadow theatre of the soul, the spirit, and the perception of what was, what is, and what could be. In a world determined by visibility, speed, and surfaces, the question of light and darkness has been around for thousands of years – or even longer. What is the meaning of radiance, brightness, luminosity, or enlightenment – and what of their absence: darkness, twilight, dimming? This question resounds within the silence of its own contemplation. Light is not just the visible, the illuminating; it is also the moment of clarity, the spark emerging from the encounter with darkness. The absence of radiance, the veil of darkness, the realm of shadows into which we fall when everything seems tangible, marks not an end but rather the origin of a deeper seeing. It is precisely in times of inner or outer darkness that the creative power that arises from suffering, uncertainty or despair unfolds. The experience of the night invites reflection and self-encounter, opening up a space in which the inner glow becomes visible in a new dimension.

Here, obscurity is not merely the absence of rays of light, but a presence of its own. In alchemical traditions, the Nigredo, the “black phase,” marks the prerequisite for every transmutation – the seemingly dead becomes the source of the new. Visions, dreams, and the engagement with archetypal shadow images show that darkness and twilight boast a creative reservoir allowing for psychological depth and aesthetic innovation. It is both a medium and a trigger, challenging the observer to engage, reflect and perceive. Every act of observation thus becomes a moment of creation, an entry into a world of its own, in which light, shadow and form are not granted.

Radical constructivism, as formulated by Heinz von Foerster, makes it clear that knowledge is never objective. Knowledge and perception arise in the interaction between the observer and the world. Every moment of seeing, every experience is an individual act of creation. A viewer of a work of art participates as an active co-creator. The work does not exist independently but is constituted by an individual’s perception and interpretation. Shadows, darkness, and obscurity become a living reality through the viewer’s attention. This interaction gives rise to a microcosmic world where personal experience, intuition, and reflection act immediately.

Mark Fisher shows that the present is haunted by the ghosts of the past – by lost prospects for the future that were never realized. In a world where the future seems impossible or lost, these ghosts interweave with the structures of the present, and darkness becomes the medium in which they are revealed. Art thus becomes a place where these lost possibilities resonate, as fleeting apparitions between twilight and radiance. The viewer is invited to confront these ghosts, reflect on them, and translate them into their own experience. Fisher’s hauntology complements the radical constructivist approach: perception is not only an individual act of creation, but also a dialogue with the shadows of history, a listening to the lost voices of time.

The encounter with darkness, twilight and heaviness opens up a process of inner transformation. Anyone who engages with the work enters a hall of mirrors, where thoughts, emotions and memories are revealed in a personal creative process. This works on two levels: the intellectual one, analysing structures of light and shadow, recognizing relationships and constructing meanings; and the meditative one, as perception itself becomes an action, an experience beyond rational control. 

The obscure and the dark are not the opposite of light, rather its precondition. This field of tension gives rise to new realms, truths, and world views. Darkness allows us to recognize inner structures, to enter the shadows of the psyche and to bring forth new light. It invites us to engage with the indeterminate, the unclear, the obscure and to shape our own worlds from it.

The combination of darkness, heaviness, radical constructivist epistemology and Fisher’s concept of the “lost future” leads to a clear insight: every observation is a creative act. Whoever enters this process not only creates a subjective reality, but also enters a world in which light and shadow, heaviness and hope, reflection, memory, and creative action are inextricably interwoven.

Thus, the title of this observation reveals itself: “Access Is off the Beaten Track.” It alludes to those spaces that elude conventional ways of seeing, to paths that are hidden, obscured and yet full of possibilities. In the confrontation with darkness, twilight and obscurity, the viewer becomes a discoverer of their own perception, a co-creator of reality and imagination. The beaten track is abandoned, not to avoid the familiar, but to create new worlds in the encounter with the indeterminate. “Off the beaten track” reveals the power of art as a transformative experience, as a realm in which every perception is an act of creation, and every shadow carries the possibility of enlightenment.

Access Is off the Beaten Track
(Zsófia Máté)

The beaten track is a metaphor for habit, of cultural and perceptual conditioning, which confines the world to a recognizable order of forms. Beyond this lies a departure from order, a transgression of the boundaries of perception, knowledge, and meaning, a mapping of side roads, blind spots, and unfamiliar spaces. The international group exhibition Access Is off the Beaten Track seeks inroads to these. The exhibits open up spaces and experiences where the perception of reality is disrupted and certainty is replaced by the strangeness lurking within the familiar.

In his book The Weird and the Eerie, British philosopher, cultural researcher, and critic Mark Fisher (1968–2017) distinguishes between two modes of perception and existence that reflect the anxieties of modernity and late capitalist culture. The words weird and eerie are difficult to translate – their Hungarian counterparts range over “strange,” “odd,” “creepy,” and “ominous” – but in Fisher’s interpretation, both of these phenomena cause the subject to lose its centralized role under the influence of some peculiar force and consequently changes its perception of the order of the world. It falls under the influence of something that is beyond its basic perception, interpretation, and experience.  The weird is the unexpected intrusion of strangeness into the familiar: an anomaly wedged into the texture of everyday reality that reveals the world not to be closed, nor interpretable by humans alone. The eerie, in contrast, emerges from a failure of presence or a failure of absence – when something is present where nothing should be, or nothing is present where something should be. Fisher’s examples include uninhabited landscapes, depopulated settlements, abandoned buildings, strange, inexplicable natural phenomena, and spine-chilling sounds, one of whose essential components are inscrutability and mystery.  Through fundamental metaphysical questions about existence and non-existence, the eerie evokes the acknowledgment that forces beyond the horizon of human perception and control are at work in the functioning of reality.

Our exhibition takes this distinctive experience as its point of departure and attempts to make its various forms perceptible and accessible without claiming to capture it in its entirety or seeking to illustrate it exhaustively. Rather, it attempts to reveal a pattern of sorts in relation to the metaphysical, psychological, and political instability that defines contemporary experience. The ecological crisis and the general cultural disorientation resulting from geopolitical realignments signal the ontological uncertainty of the present world among other things – a state in which the boundaries between reality and fiction, human and non-human, natural and artificial are constantly shifting, leaving behind unsettling, ominous feelings. With reality lacking any ostensible stability, artistic reflections on this situation employ various strategies to attune to the unknown, attempting to grasp the invisible structures and agencies that govern reality. In order to orient oneself in uncertain, transitional spaces, spectral visuality, and realities that have become subverted, it is essential to turn towards the strange, the beyond.

Foreign Landscapes

In Roland Flexner’s pictures, the deserted, alien landscape is both uncanny and idyllic. His airy yet dense ink drawings are created by obeying chance and the inherent movement of the material, while balancing on the edge of landscapes and abstraction. In the cosmic spaces that open up in these works, the remnants of another world seem to loom. Flexner’s pictures convey the frozen yet lively atmosphere of unknown post-human nature.

The relationship between nature and man is no longer secure but disturbingly ambivalent in Mihael Milunović’s painting, which depicts a boy standing in a lake and a figure watching him from the shore. Behind the everyday nature of the scene lurks a kind of ominous calm, as if the idyllic landscape were concealing repressed tensions, the motionless figures appearing more like objects observed than active beings. In Milunović’s complex pictorial world, architectural structures, monumental objects, and fragments of nature mostly create constellations in which human presence is inscribed as an absence.

In Ádám Horváth’s works, nature is illusory and sensual, magical and material at the same time. In his paintings and installations full of symbolism, organic forms carry the threat of nature’s decay and destruction and the surrealistic vision of nature as a mystical, otherworldly entity. In works that combine the lyricism of bioromanticism and the dark, unsettling atmosphere of eco-horror aesthetics, nature is not a familiar environment or idyllic backdrop but an unpredictable, inscrutable force.

Adrián Klájó’s work The Coming of Spring / The Funeral of Spring explores the rites of rebirth and decay, the dark side of rural culture and folk customs. His installation arranges ethnographic objects, agricultural tools, and folkloric motifs into an ominous, uncanny ensemble, which the artist describes as “agro-gothic.” The objects take on new significance, their practical function is replaced by rites, their practicality by symbolic meaning and presence. Klájó’s work brings to the surface the repressed layers of history and tradition, those collective fears and anxieties which lurk behind the rationality of modernity.

Strange Creatures

Jina Park’s paintings evoke the world of Wunderkammer, where elements of reality are arranged in irrational contexts and a surrealistic space. The peculiar constellation of objects and figures evokes a sense of strangeness, confusion, and ominous uncertainty, while the images themselves reflect on the nature of spectacle and illusion. In the theatrical spaces of these paintings, we are confronted with a rearranged, unfamiliar logic of reality, of certain elements of nature.

Leopold Rabus’s grotesque bodies depart from the tradition of classical human representation, breaking down and distorting its internal logic. Perspectives shift, bodies are deformed, space tilts. The human shape becomes a transient figure, as though it had stepped into our world from another dimension. The naturalistic elaborateness and absurdity of the painting Couple avec un chat/ Couple with Cat reinforce each other: the grotesque exaggerations of an everyday scene bring about the destabilization of reality. 

Richard Stipl’s sculptures examine the human body, exploring human emotions and relational networks through the fragmentation of the body and the collision of sacred and profane signifiers, using the expressive power of movement and gesture. In his works, the body is both a ritual and an uncanny entity; his sculptures, constructed from distorted body fragments, can be interpreted as an ominous allegory of the disintegration of the body and the cracking of identity.

Similarly, Martin Gerboc’s grotesque portraits draw on the tradition of conventional human representation, but they nuance it by adding a darker psychological dimension. The Red Portraits series gives centre stage to the question of the face as identity and as a mask. The dominance of the colour red alludes to life, blood, and violence, while the palette of fleshy hues refer to the inner spaces of the body. Gerboc’s works not merely employ the aesthetics of horror but evoke the unconscious forces at work beneath the surface of modern society.

In Eszter Metzing’s installation, the boundaries between human and non-human, the earthly and the completely alien are ultimately blurred. Her work is constructed from organic forms, reminiscent of creeping plants or tentacled beings, taking on the shape of an organic, cell-like, rhizomatically sprawling unknown entity that seems to originate from beyond the limits of human perception. In Metzing’s installation, the boundaries between the familiar and the alien dissolve, evoking a sense of unease and uncertainty in the substrata of experience.

Unknown Future

Chino Moya’s video Four Fluctuations unfolds a dystopian vision in which humanity gradually loses its physicality and is then rebuilt in a cognitive system shared with machines and other life forms. The four episodes – artificial intelligence, post-physicality, digital extinction, and hybrid rebirth – outline the topography of post-human existence. 

In Geneviève Capitanio’s West Field series, landscape painting merges with visions of a future without humans. Post-apocalyptic spaces reveal themselves, where alien, abstract monoliths float above ruins and wrecked cars. Capitanio’s works emanate the eerie desolation of the remnants of civilization and the frozen calm of the post-human world.

In his works created using montage and collage techniques, Sándor Szász superimposes time planes and image layers to create transitional spaces in which real and fantastic elements are simultaneously present in alien constellations. The deserted landscapes pervaded by a post-apocalyptic mood are populated by fragments, ruins, and relics that merely allude to human presence as its scattered remnants. 

The Aesthetics of Vanishing

Fisher describes the eerie primarily as a mode of perception and existence, but he analyzes it mainly through examples from literature, music, film, and pop culture, perhaps not considering it as an independent aesthetic category but still as a distinct mode of aesthetic experience. Although the examples he takes from creative art are few and far between, we can state that his framework is valid and productive in the interpretation of certain trends in contemporary visual art as well. In recent years, the stylistic features and motifs of the Gothic have become increasingly prevalent in the visual arts; artistic representation, aiming to address the self-definition and the internal processes of humans, as well as the external threats to the human world, often finds forms and narrative modes in the aesthetic tools of fantasy and horror. Decay, the instability of the body and matter at large, and the perception of hidden and invisible forces in art are symptomatic expressions of a collective destabilization that affect the subject, identity, the environment, and our perception of reality alike. Today, the Gothic and the aesthetic experiences closely associated with it are metaphors not so much for an uncanny, unburied past, but for an uncertain perception of reality in the present. The exhibition seeks to explore this contemporary restlessness, the mental and physical spaces defined by absence, tension, and fragmentation. 

Fisher’s analysis ultimately arrives at the so-called eerie calm state, which occurs when confrontation with the unknown no longer evokes fear but manifests itself in the form of a peculiar calmness. Eerie calm carries within it the possibility of overcoming shock: the realization that stepping into the unknown, vanishing and dissolving into it, can also be the beginning of a new way of perceiving and being. The Access Is off the Beaten Track exhibition attempts to open a gateway to an immersion into the unknown, towards the aesthetics of vanishing. 

Zsófia Máté

Translated by Boldizsár Fejérvári