TAT  Contemporary Art Gallery

Sándor Hegyes wanted to be a painter, graduated as an IT specialist, works as a teacher and has consummated his art in his photo-montages, in which, his pictorial vein takes over. His pictures rather seem to be hyper realistic paintings placed in surreal space and time. Pragmatically, his works are not even photographs, since, by definition, a photo is an image that depicts a single captured moment, meanwhile, when it comes to Sándor Hegyes’s pictures, it is absolutely not the case. His montages comprise hours, days, weeks, in some cases even years or a whole lifetime.

 

During his creative process, he endeavors to address one’s esthetic sense not merely with the spectacle, but also with the moral meaning of his works, with the help of which he gives one the chance, or rather compels one to use their associative imagination. He does not give his pictures a title either, he leaves the decision to the viewer what to see in them, letting the thoughts flitting around freely this way. The spectator is not told what to think, not limited, provided nothing to go on, which way the artist manages for his pictures to mean something quite different to everybody. One thing remains certain that the spectacle of his pictures takes one’s thoughts in a rather nostalgic-sorrowful place, their grayish, lackluster shades do not let the viewer think of positive moments of life.

 

It is important that, this time, the artist does not play the role of the photographer in the classical sense, he does not pose as a voyeur or bystander. His photos have a much more personal tone than that, as he appears in the center of many of his pictures himself, or he features himself as the main character of his dreamlike stories, as one might put it. If Sándor Hegyes’s art were to be classifiable into a literary category, they could be rendered as epic poems written in first person singular.

 

Barbara Orsolya Balázs

 

 

Translated by Anna Voelgyi