Pap Gábor (1991)

Gábor Pap was born in Szentes in 1991 and grew up in the small town of Öcsöd on the Hungarian Great Plain. He graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2020. After graduating, he moved back to the countryside, to his grandmother's old house. During the year spent in retreat, he found his own painting language: after an 11-month break and creating 11 new monumental, shaped canvases, he organized his first solo exhibition in Budapest with curator Gábor Rieder.

Regarding his works, compared to his former ad hoc abstracts, he has started to collect and build a new, unique figurative style. Some of the motifs are very personal, and he varies them with other contingent elements. The motifs come from a wide variety of platforms, mainly family photo albums, selfies from his phone, Facebook, Instagram, TV channels and other sources full of information. He groups the found image elements into a suitable amorphous set. Amidst the barely recognizable motifs, personal memory crumbs and compulsive screenshots from insomniac nights flash in automatic writing disorder. Pap creates visual montages in a spontaneous manner, where his memories surface and come together in a flashback-like sequence. A symbolic framing element adds a third dimension to the entire composition, sometimes filled with building materials such as bricks, decorative stones, and reinforced concrete, and sometimes with the edges of pages from a notebook. Gábor uses illustrations from local junk newspapers, daily/weekly newspapers, and draws about sex chat models and online walks in the Vatican, etc. During the creation-motif collection process, he uses minimal, mainly instinctive content selection. The resulting work was born for misunderstanding. Through empathic identification, everyone sees an intended, figurative image and reaches some kind of apparent decipherment (or at least the compulsion to decipher).

The main goal is to move away from the compulsion to conform to "nicely" painted and drawn artworks and create a weird, unexpected, but still familiar thing. He tries to find perfect imperfect shapes and uses image defects as an advantage. He spreads the paint with his fingers, scratches the surface with markers, or works with broken crayons or spray paint, giving the pictures a brutally raw, expressive naivety. Instead of perfect and polished right angles, he uses irregular, jagged formats with corners and fissures. It could be a criticism against the dominance of elitist art that depends on information, what he calls "smart" art. Pap's art is more honest than bad painting, more raw than naive painting, more damaged than fashionable glitch aesthetics, and more destructive than trendy trash.

He currently lives and works in Öcsöd.

/Gábor Rieder/