Szabolcs Veres “The State of Mind”

Spencer Brownstone Gallery

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Spencer Brownstone Gallery presents The State of Mind, Romanian artist Szabolcs Veres’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Known for a painterly style which eschews classical techniques – marked by disorderly brush strokes, a variegated palette, and grotesque subject matter – Veres returns with a collection of works rooted in an entirely new mode of painting.

These paintings draw their initial inspiration from the artist’s raw memory, candid photographs, and artworks throughout history. But through a process which foregrounds spontaneity, persistent layering, and erasure, what remains of each painting’s original composition is concealed. Emerging from flawed recollection and destruction, the final images reflect the sketch-like technique of alla prima, where pencil or oil paint is applied in decisive yet rapid strokes. The figures, objects, and landscapes that inhabit the canvases are therefore hazy in their edges, with distinct features and energized movements fading into obfuscation.

As lingering imprints of a particular time and space, they mimic the visual outcome of memory recollection – at times opaque or surreal, yet unwaveringly intimate in nature. The resulting picture is an unsettling evolution of concepts of beauty, tension between the intimacy of the image and the painting method.

Szabolcs Veres is a painter born in Satu Mare, Romania, and currently working and living in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He received his PhD, MFA, and BFA at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Veres has had solo exhibitions at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne, Germany; at Bazis - The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj Romania and Galeria Radio Cluj, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His work has been featured in several group exhibitions in New York, Romania, Germany, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, and Italy.