Edith Torony: December 2015

100/100 cm, acrylic on canvas

Junkyard Symphony

In the "Junkyard Symphony" series I keep studying the same space from the periphery of the city where I live, space which I explore since 2012 through various techniques: photography, digital manipulation or painting. Between 2013 and 2014 I studied in this area the animal trough, as an element that is found in almost all the works from the "Vertical Absorption" series. As I ended the series, consistent with the changes that have undergone to this space, after the expansion of the city and the inhabitation area which now is more accessible to humans, there began to appear all kinds of plastic waste, synthetic residues, from bright and colorful packaging, to plastic tubes, unaesthetic power poles and wires, all kinds of objects that caught my eye, everything what was thrown away or not integrated in the view. Although I start from a real, existing place that is very close to me, I transform it through my work according to certain events, to everything that I collect during the days. Therefore the name of "junkyard", a sort of recycle bin of the memory, of the unconscious, sometimes these elements are indescribable, to which I do not find meaning or the origin. A sort of personal archeology as a chaotic landscape, populated with all kinds of rejected objects that we no longer need, abstract representations, sometimes with figurative origins, always at the edge. An apparent beauty of everything that is residue, attractive packaging, but lacking content. A desolate space, invaded by everything we don`t need anymore, which we can't get rid of easily. Beginning with the two works with the title "Party Is Over" in 2015, which represent the debris left by people on the beach after they had a good time, I went ahead with the same subject in the "Periphery of Memory" series, thus symbolically transmitting to a mental dimension and gradually reaching the series "Junkyard Symphony" , an ode to chaos and reconstruction, to recomposition, reducing everything to a recycled playground so typical for a second-hand world of our time, from which we can not recant.

Vertical Absorption

The “Vertical Absorption” series is more spiritual in character due to the propensity for ascension, for verticality. I have tried to render the metaphysical side – the isolation in empty spaces – of the manifestations of the psychic or the unpredictable in reality. Stripes and fragments rise to higher planes.

It is all about a correspondence between the telluric and the celestial, the physical and psychical decomposition that is dissolved, absorbed into the infinite. I have always wondered what happens to all the information and memories we store or inherit with the collective unconscious after our physic existence ceases. Gustav Jung says that “any comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself of psychic nature and in this regard we are captive in an exclusively psychic world”. The trough is, in my work, a kind of reservoir resembling the subconscious, from where deeply rooted fragments, traditions and abstractions spring and are immediately absorbed into vertical ascension.

At the same time, I see some of my compositions as hierophanies, manifestations of the sacred, the unpredictable or the absurd, as I prefer to call it. Mircea Eliade says that space is not homogeneous; therefore, such manifestations occur where there are ruptures that allow the unpredictable to arise. These manifestations are the pretexts for images, for the effect of spontaneity that I seek in my works, for the elements that appear all of a sudden, violently and dynamically. What has always interested me in an image is the effect of space, of full-empty areas, the focus on certain parts and bringing them to the foreground.

Techniques like dripping, imprints or brush strokes, the spatula and other tools help me preserve the freshness of my paintings, to find a balance between the full, loaded areas and the empty, inert ones. I have given the trough, this common, rudimentary object, a new meaning, not only that of a reservoir, a source of water, but also the whole psychical background with exterior manifestations. I find myself in a capitalist world held captive by technology, eager to return to an older source, to a farther, abstract corner belonging to an archaic cultural background, in search for the verticality that has become so necessary in our times.

Periphery Of Memory II