Zsolt Péter Barta

The career of Péter Zsolt Barta reflects the search for a new path, the quest for artistic self-identity, and the fulfilment of his attempts to create his own professional life, which began in the epochal environment of the photographic art of the 1980s and culminated after the regime change with a fresh spirit. He has given new meaning to photography while, at the same time, reaching back to tradition in his use of tools. Among other things, it was the inspiring vibrancy of the duality described above that created the progressive and creative attitude that has made Zsolt Barta an outstanding artist in Hungarian and international photography. Perhaps most fundamentally, when examining the photographs of Péter Zsolt Barta, he elevated photography to the status of an art object through his visionary definition of the medium, which has since been recognised as an autonomous work of fine art. The private ownership and art-collecting culture that had been taken for granted until the end of World War II were ideologically invalidated during the decades of socialism, and neither art collectors nor photographers themselves regarded photography as a valuable, possessable art object. Zsolt Barta changed this perception, which had prevailed for almost forty-five years, first through the photographs he took and later, as his professional public activity grew, he became a catalyst for change in how the Hungarian photographic profession viewed art and art trade. The artist’s photographs reveal his preoccupation with the passing of time and melancholy. The different parts of young or old, living or lifeless human bodies, the cracked, fragmented, decayed, mouldy wall surfaces, the plants living in a humid, stuffy environment, among other things, seem to point to the same question from their starting point: the existence of changes that take place over a unit of time, which are revealed in a specific moment. The relationship between the frozen moment and the constantly passing time may also contain a tension-generating duality, but this duality takes on a multi-level meaning in Zsolt Barta’s creative vision. The first possible reason for this lies in the technical means available to him at the beginning of his career, and partly in his denial of the schematic vision of socialist realism. In terms of his use of tools, he returns to the large cameras of his photographic predecessors, with which he represents traditional and classical values in his photographs, while at the same time transcending social realism and introducing hitherto unseen contemporary themes. His preference for black and white photographs is also a sign of his attachment to tradition, but also a more essential way of expressing himself; in this sense, he is moving towards a more abstract way of representation with his black and white photographs and then, with his colour series of Üvegház (Glass Houses), among others. In his series Balett (Ballet), the female bodies photographed at the beginning of his career are presented in almost impossible positions. All of this implies the emergence of a new kind of body-image investigation, which also draws on contemporary dance, an exploration of the ultimate limits of the body’s movements, and an overcoming of the subtle, kitschy eroticism of socialism. Beyond his previous series of photographs, Peter Zsolt Barta presents living and inanimate body parts in an almost bewilderingly bizarre way, endowing them with an additional meaning and creating a unique, idiosyncratic view through contrasting aesthetic qualities. The former carry a lyrical, often philosophical tone, distinct from the earlier documentary identity of the photograph. In his 1993 photograph Tört Üveg (Broken Glass), made with gelatin silver using a barite technique, a human head is shown in a glass, contained in formalin, the liquid dividing the photograph horizontally roughly in the centre. The signs of decomposition by the various organisms adhering to the glass appear in the upper left and upper right corners of the photograph, but by illuminating the glass, Zsolt Barta makes the lifeless body part appear alive, and by leaving the eyeball dark, he makes the dead eye visible. By eliminating the inherent functions of common, familiar objects and demonstration tools used by medics, he endows them with transcendent meanings, allowing the viewer to forge a personal relationship to life and death as they examine the photographs. His system of relations between the living and the inanimate is also emphasised in his series Csarnok (Hall). Alongside the dark, interior, abandoned, and slowly disintegrating walls of industrial buildings, fresh green plants peer through their window panes into the decay, as if, after exploring the exterior spaces and partially reclaiming their original habitat, they are eyeing the possible expansion of the boundaries of their newly created living space. In his photograph from 2010 Csarnok – Újratöltve LKM4152 (Hall – Reloaded LKM4152), the artist has developed the theme further, with the windows already partially broken, the plants settled in the space outside the building, and the greenish, yellowish tones in the lower right corner of the photograph evoking the remains of yellow graffiti on the shattered glass, foreshadowing the development of a relationship with the interior. In the photograph LKM 3145 (Giclée print, 2010), the almost horrendous brutality of the plants’ occupation of space is visible, with the viewer barely perceiving anything of the exterior, the sprawling stems and leaves almost filling the mosaics of the glass window, several metres high, and reaching into the interior of the dilapidated building, thus definitively settling the duel between nature and industrial installations, which had preoccupied the artist since childhood. Along the same lines, and with an increasing tendency towards more abstract forms, he created his composition Fal (Wall) in 2008. The artist has photographed a section of mouldy wall surface, with a broad horizon and a bleak, harsh landscape in the lower fifth of the photograph, upon which a dense meteor shower of mould spots falls as if in a final judgment. His photograph, Geopont (Geopoint), also taken in 2008, is a measuring point, barely half a metre high, drilled into a dirty, mossy piece of concrete, which looks like a satellite topography map photographed from several kilometres above and a surveying station shrunk to a point in the distance. In his photograph, Föld (Earth) from 2004, the close-up of the landmass is revealed as a huge perpendicular wall of rock, reinforced by the fact that Zsolt Barta includes the small flat area in front of the landmass in the horizontally triangulated photograph, the small gravel boulders on which it is placed dwarfing the wall monstrosity like buildings visible from a distance. Selected from his series Üveház (Glasshouse), in his 2008 photograph Üvegház 04553 (Glasshouse 04553), we share in the hopelessness of the crumbling wall, achieved through lighting, the mould that occupies the space, and the transformation of the leaf of a creeping plant into a human face with an emotional charge. With the above photographs, among others, Peter Zsolt Barta does not intend to formulate a clear and well-defined message, but merely offers a possible focus for the ideas he raises. His photographs are never closed; they always gain concrete meaning for the viewer, becoming personal through the viewer’s relationship to life, death, and transcendence. The appearance of indefinable or indeterminate forms takes the viewer into the realm of fine art rather than photography. Thus, although, as viewers, we often strive almost instinctively to discover the knowable, the concrete, and the obvious, the photographs of Péter Zsolt Barta not only turn the creatures and objects in his photographs, but also us, out of our everyday reality, giving us the freedom of playful association and reflection.