Table for One is an intimate cabinet exhibition at Longtermhandstand bringing together new drawings by Áron Lőrincz and Hydeon (Ian Fergusson). Developed through years of friendship and an ongoing dialogue between Budapest and New York, the exhibition reflects on the solitary rhythms of artistic life and on drawing itself as an act of sustained attention.

At first glance, both artists seem to look backwards. Pirates, Victorian figures, old European architecture, factories and imagined landscapes evoke worlds belonging to another time. Yet these meticulously rendered drawings are unmistakably contemporary. A Trenitalia train enters Hydeon’s seemingly nineteenth-century universe; a pirate raises a flag referencing Pantera. Past and present continuously leak into one another, turning nostalgia into something stranger and more playful: a space from which to look at the present.

The exhibition’s title refers to another shared territory between the two artists: solitude. Artists often spend long stretches alone in the studio, absorbed in worlds that gradually become more real than whatever is happening outside. Working hours stretch, routines shift, meals happen late. After countless hours of concentration, the reservation is often simply table for one.

For Áron Lőrincz, this inward journey repeatedly leads to pirates, drifters and outsiders. His recurring young pirate is stubborn, mischievous and defiantly independent: knocking over champagne glasses, posing with a sword or disappearing into adventures of his own making. Part alter ego and part universal archetype, the figure embodies rebellion, instinct and the child within us that refuses to fully submit to convention. Even the tiger appearing beneath him originates in Lőrincz’s own cat, transformed through drawing into an image of raw, elemental force.

Rendered in graphite with obsessive precision, Lőrincz’s works approach nonconformity not through grand gestures but through small, persistent acts of imagination. Fiction becomes a territory of freedom.

Working under the name Hydeon, California-born, New York-based artist Ian Fergusson constructs equally meticulous worlds suspended somewhere between architecture, memory and fantasy. Victorian women and bowler-hatted men inhabit cities of chimneys, monumental buildings and intricate interiors. His drawings draw deeply on his fascination with nineteenth-century Europe, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, and artists ranging from Bruegel and Bosch to Leonardo, Caravaggio and Escher.

For Hydeon, looking backwards is also a way of imagining a different rhythm of existence: a world before smartphones and constant digital acceleration, when cities, architecture, nature and physical correspondence structured everyday experience differently. Budapest occupies a particularly personal place within this fascination. Having been obsessed with the Hungarian Parliament since childhood, Hydeon was so overwhelmed by finally seeing the building from the Chain Bridge at sunset that he later had it tattooed across his chest.

Despite their different visual universes, Lőrincz and Hydeon meet in their fascination with outsiders, invented histories and the possibility of temporarily stepping outside the logic of the present. Their drawings demand the same thing from the viewer that their making demands from the artists: time, attention and a willingness to disappear into another world.

Table for One is ultimately about that disappearance. About the peculiar solitude of making something slowly in a world increasingly organised around speed, and about the imaginary worlds that can emerge when someone stays alone with a drawing long enough.

Text by Péter Bencze