C-Print, 90 x 70 cm

Fourteen scenes that seem to be taken straight from life. Except that this life is the height of artifice. Lucia, Anton, Anna, Birgitta, Franz, and all the others act out everyday life: earnestly and with intense focus. No gesture that is not staged, and no object that is not a prop. Istvan Balogh has directed with evident delight and apt irony. The result is tableaux vivants—living pictures. They tell of trials. What is a human being in the moment of greatest peril? A typology of physical and emotional vulnerability unfolds. In the flash of insight or the appearance of a miracle, the world stands still. Steadfastness means nothing less than a gathering of all energies. And every decision at the crossroads leads into the depths of existence. The unspeakable happens.

How can this event be conveyed in a way that is easy to understand? Even if such clarity must remain a fiction, it implies, first and foremost, simplification. Furthermore, it suggests drawing on traditional forms and formulas of storytelling. Such as those found in the “Legenda Aurea” by the Genoese Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, for example, collected, edited, and written down as a chronicle of the saints, their deeds, their trials, and their heavenly reward, around the year of our Lord 1270. Reading this text offers strange experiences. It takes us back to a world of unconditional faith that demanded concrete visual representation. Even the most modest work of art from the late Middle Ages thus spoke of the image of the divine in nature and in the human works of those who do God’s will. The Golden Legend provided the material and the rules for this. The creative power of its author and the binding nature of its ideology satisfied the hunger for imagery in the Christian world of that time. Such power of influence is fascinating. Even and especially today—because it contradicts our current experiences of artistic individualization in all that we see and understand. This contradiction also attests to a development that is likely irreversible in cultural history: the increasing release of visual systems from social responsibility. This is, in essence, what Istvan Balogh’s work is about. Its distinctive aesthetic responds to this. And that is precisely what makes it not only coherent, but important.

Martin Heller