Through the Wall

According to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard the cellar
“is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of
subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the
irrationality of the depths.” Márton Emil Tóth’s latest exhibition in the
underground project space PINCE (which means cellar in Hungarian) aspires to explore
this dark entity, the one that consorts with subterranean forces. On this occasion
the cellar is simultaneously the metaphorical realm of beliefs, desires, ideas
and the domain of very concrete phenomena, objects, artificial and natural
formations, living and inanimate matters.

The cellar can be used as an
emergency shelter, as a terminal destination for objects intended for storing
and depositing. We can also regard it as a space suitable for conservation,
maturation and fermentation.

One can say that the cellar can devour the traces of long
gone or vanishing civilisations, however, thanks to its moist walls and damp
climate it can also facilitate the birth of new worlds like salt
crystallisations or colonies of fungi.

In the exhibited artworks, Márton Emil Tóth depicts this
duality: just like in the depth of the cellar, in his works seemingly opposing
forces – remembrance and oblivion, annihilation and genesis, decay and
vegetation – work simultaneously.

His analysis is removed from the plane of concepts and
discourses, he utilizes the tools of visual art research to set up a framework
that investigates these processes as the subject or object (depending on the
nature of the resulting artwork) of the creative process, for instance the
formation, growth and proliferation of salt colonies or fungi on the walls of
the cellar. It is important to note that the majority of the exhibited artworks
cannot be regarded as mere imprints of depicting, reproducing or any kind of mimetic,
imitating processes or activities.

The supposedly bound ontological categories that conventionally
separate and distinguish between creator and the creation are ambiguous, thus, these
statuses should be diluted, questioned, transgressed, and instead of the
traditional binary distinction we should (rather fittingly) talk about a
mushrooming number of statuses.

The artworks of the latest exhibition in PINCE enter into this
symbolical and symbiotic playground and invites us, spectators to enter this
seemingly chaotic, uncentralized and unfocused land of multitude, where the
boundaries between the creator and the receiver, the artwork and its ambience,
and the mundane plateau of rationality versus the realm of irrationality
residing in the depth of the cellar, are never set.

Zsolt Miklósvölgyi