Z.I.P – Zoom In Paintings by Botond Keresztesi / Lemoyne

Curated by Peter Bencze

2020 August 8 – 2020 August
30

Lemoyne

Kristin Brüggemann, c/o Feld Club, Feldstrasse 121, 

8004 Zurich, Switzerland

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of Lemoyne,
Zurich and Everybody Needs Art, Budapest and the artist

Photo credit: Sabina Bösch

Instagram: @keresztesibotond
@lemoyneproject @everybodyneedsart

Text by Sonja Teszler

8.11 AM

I woke up early feeling
positive, with new purpose. I think today might just be it, there is astrange
vibration in the air.

We might find the New
Form and I will be the one to find it. Also, I think I was dreaming of
mountains again, just when I thought I forgot what they looked like.

9.58 AM

Got to the Lab earlier
than anyone else, eager to start the new experiment. I like having a moment
alone with my microscope – to polish and prepare it. Its touch feels almost
like a second skin now – I love its sleek, curved, steady arc between my
fingers, to turn its coarse and

fine focuses and hear
the delicious clicks one after the other, to feed its clear glass tongue with
various droplets of information.

It’s a very intimate,
almost transcendent space that we share – me and this machine, solving the big
mysteries of our kind as one, finding the One True New Form. Often, I feel like
it understands me more than my peers here, or anyone has ever had.

Its cold, precise body
calms me down, promising results. It makes me feel safe and powerful.

This could be how man
must’ve felt when Prometheus first gave them Fire.

13.22 PM

Spent the last couple of
hours picking and trying out the different heads but it’s just not working. I
don’t know what I’m doing wrong. The head prototypes were generated based on
our last lab report that clearly prescribed the New Form’s facial structure.
For the past more than 1000 years we have been doing this research, collecting
data on ideal forms from every century: Venuses of Willendorf and Velasquez,
Egyptian carvings, Michelangelo’s David, the ladies of Török János and Zsolnay,
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Mademoiselle D’Avignon, Monroe, Kardashian,
feeding it into our A.I system to create the New Perfect Form out of the
repurposed old ideals. We have looked at every organic form ever created by Man
and Nature, every little pixel of symmetry.

So why can’t we do what
Nature did? What are we missing?

17.15 PM

I can’t focus on work
anymore and keep walking up and down the Lab. Am I the only one here who sees
that we aren’t going anywhere with all this work? What even is the New Form?
All this data that we have gathered and analysed from all these different
sources throughout the ages – isn’t it all arbitrary and subjective? Who are we
to say what the New Face or New Body or New Mind should be? And why haven’t we
interacted with Nature itself, just data, for over 1000 years?

I tried to talk to my
colleague P. about it but they just spoke to me as if I was a child or a madman.

I asked them if they
remembered mountains or the sky – they just stared at me, told me to write a
journal entry about how I was feeling, and then went back to their goddamn microscope.

22.48 PM

I’m going to try to
sleep. Things needs to change tomorrow… somebody has to ask questions.

Sometimes I think
They’re just laughing at us. Sometimes, I wonder if our goal, the New Form, even
exists – whether they just keep us at this god-forsaken lab because we are the
ones being experimented on. I’m saying all this out loud to the moth prototype,
or the Falcon as I call it, that I made a couple of months ago…lately, it’s the
only thing I’ve been talking to really. There is something comforting about
this little flying machine, encircling the light every evening, over and over
again, with new hope, new purpose every time.

I wonder how it remember
that’s what it’s supposed to do…