Bio & Statement

Bálint Rádóczy, independent visual researcher, multidisciplinary artist born in Budapest, Hungary 1977, working in Basel, Switzerland & Pécs, Hungary. MFA graduate of Zurich University of the Arts, 2014. Creative director and member of the curatorial board of Cinema Apollo Foundation, Pécs, Hungary. Received a Bachelor’s Degree at the Kodolányi János University of Applied Sciences, Hungary, in Humanities in Communication and Media Studies, 1997, a Diploma at the University of Szeged, Hungary in Humanities, Liberal arts, media and communication, 2002. Started visual arts studies at the age of 10, at Martyn Ferenc Free School of Arts in Hungary.

Position — Metamodernism, epistemology, existentialism

My oeuvre is largely rooted in epistemological research: in challenging, relativizing knowledge, its methods, validity, scopes and relation to understanding. Knowledge is a contextual construct — it observes its subjects in accordance to certain objectives, therefore it is always targeted and targeting, limited and limiting, while I seek ‘absolute understanding’ unattached to circumstance. As a metamodernist, my aim is to generate oscillation and exchange between these aspects. I’m devoted to questioning current sets of value, philosophical and socio-cultural fashions to reinforce critical thinking.

Objective — Art for the people

I’d like to see more of art as a social service to humanity, for mankind’s enlightenment and understanding of life — not as an elitist bubble of the select few, based on an exclusionary hierarchy of a fundamentally capitalistic “art world”. It is a challenge fit for me to try to create something that is ambitious, complex and layered in meaning and yet manages to boil down to a broadly digestible format, to make art that actually helps you to live.

Form — Sincerity & accessibility

I strive for clarity and simplicity of expression, with the ambition of being intelligible and engaging on a broad human scale. I stand for relentless immediacy and disarming, passionate honesty in expression. I’m not committed to material, medium or form: I aim for the respective message being delivered in any engaging way. I tend to present my work as ‘open source’ processes, offering access, options to intervene, modify, appropriate. I often carry out long-term performative practices in correlation with installation, photography, text, presentation & dance.

References

New sincerity, informed naivety and moderate fanaticism — Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Bourgeois — Wolfgang Tillmans — Thomas Hirschhorn — Terry Riley, John Cage, Philip Glass, Brian Eno — Art Brut, Arte Povera — the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism — Asemic and automatic writing — the theory of Nonconceptual Mental Content — R. D. Laing — Jiddu Krishnamurti — Kahlil Gibran