„Meine Augen wurden trübe,
Fernes, mütterliches Land,
Ach! sie bleiben dir voll Liebe,
Und voll Sehnsucht zugewandt!“
NOVALIS, Schriften
„La vie va se perdre dans la mort, les fleuves dans la mer et le connu dans l'inconnu. La connaissance est l'accès de l'inconnu. Le non-sens est l'aboutissement de chaque sens possible.“
Georges BATAILLE in L'Expérience Intérieure
Arpad Polgar was born in Geneva, Switzerland and works between Bern and Geneva. His tradecraft includes analog and digital photography as well as mixed media.
Arpad’s scrutiny of natural phenomena stems from a lifelong quest to understand nature’s processes in an accession that progressively morphed beyond forthright rapture and primarily dialectical questioning towards a more emotional and contemplative agreement with unsolved complexities of immensity. His visual methodology is centered on an obvious and insatiable appetite for the cycles of metamorphoses, for infinitesimal details and structures of growth and dissolution, of bloom and decay. In his artistic practice, photography seemed a fitting tool to define a starting point: the systematic extraction, dissection and collection of typologies taken out of their natural fluxes, enable the necessary time-independent inspection of a fleeting condition of a chosen phenomenon.
By iteratively shifting away from mimesis, Arpad gradually abandoned the naturalistic cliché to create symbolic representations, noticeably inspired by the aesthetics of Japanese Edo paintings. Exploring the fringes of photographic replication, he ventures by immersion in a recomposed universe of scattered and superimposed fragments and objects of nature, amalgamated with artefacts of apparently random fragments of paintworks and textures. The accumulation of discrete moments and patched-together scenes model newly reconfigured topographies, evanescent gardens or transfigured botanical anatomies. The creative process, tracking down the furtive and the multiple, resembles a parallel metabolism replicating the eternal cycles of contraction and expansion, reverberating an ode to the cosmos.
He has participated in collective and individual expositions since 2001 in Geneva, Zurich, Budapest, Rotterdam, Saanen, Verbier, Baden. His works are currently shown at the galleries ArtBongard in Geneva / Verbier and Galerie94 in Baden.
Current gallery representations:
https://artbongard.com/
https://www.galerie94.ch/