SOCMOSIS, 2013

Barna Péli's exhibition titled Socmosis is the third occasion when the gallery hosts a site-specifically staged "mass scene," whose subjects are polyurethane foam-bodied figures or "innovative" characters made of pressed sponge.
In the compound word of the exhibition's title, the prefix socio- refers to this human multitude, while the osmosis principle, which "strives for the even filling of the available space," is the standard for their systematization needs. The artist fulfills this homogenization process by eliminating the possibility of following a dominant narrative in a straight line in a way characteristic of Péli, dethroning the authentic not only at the level of the entire story but also at the level of individual figures.
With the temporal unfolding of stories, the physical appearance of the figures is a constantly changing factor, a current condition whose free adjustments are anticipated by the material use of trash aesthetics. The opinion that, since Macherey in criticism, emphasizes the diversity of artworks and the fundamental break in their structure—after which "the artwork is no longer unified or organic, but a junkyard of fragmented subsystems, random raw materials, and all kinds of impulses"—provides a perfect diagnosis of Péli's creative practice.
If we return to society, a freely chosen segment or concentrated density of which Péli presents to us in these twenty-three figures, we get the human raw material understood in the Hobbesian sense, which becomes a "political body" through transformation, ordering, and unification.
Péli's unintentional political nature perhaps also gains ground from a characteristic of pop culture that is still permissive toward the original in the free connection of signs detached from their original signified. Today, our consciousness of history operates on the same principle as digital samplers in music; namely, they no longer produce the new in their own right but convert the results of collection work into digital form and use them rearranged in remixes.
Classical signifiers such as the raising of hands, the kippah, or the spread legs—thus Christ, Judaism, or Courbet—mixed with signifiers distant in time and space from their original contexts create what collage means in the increasingly less separate high culture and what mash-up means in mass culture. The 'sculpture group' thus implements the intertextual operating principle of network culture in solid material, while we jump from one meaning cluster to another in reading the multiple story-lines.
The new figurative trend in Hungarian sculpture after the turn of the millennium perhaps compensates for the post-socialist phenomenon that assigned ideological political intentionality to modeling the human figure in sculpture. Postmodernism is more ironic in its everything-overturning character, and the tale it tells, in its disorganization, is more of a symptom of the times than didactics.
Szilvi Német

Opened by: János Szoboszlai