EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL - Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaujvaros

Only a moment of uncertainty perceived, or the uncertainty of a snapshot. We're there or not, the artist and audience – could it affect any process? Will the model change its form if its taken out from the environment in which its familiar with? Will it cause different impressions if – of course on only one painting – it gets maimed or got placed in another demented life situation?
Betuker portraits, nudes record daily moments that could seem a little banal in many cases: a neighbor look-a-like person for example a young woman lying in the bath with cotton balls on her eyes  or a man at work. But sometimes we can see absurd situations on canvases beside the realistically depicted scenes – which can make us constantly disappointed and able to keep us restless.

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Welcome to the Uncanny Valley - Bazis Contemporary Art, Cluj Napoca

The painting has died several times until now, but, every time the contemporary art buried it, we mourned at a funeral without a body, just because the painting had been buried alive. It always came back to life afterwards. Because, in fact, it had never left.
Berszan Zsolt, Betuker Istvan and Veres Szabolcs are artists that took on their account the return of the painting (its most recent resurrection) in Romanian contemporary art. Their painting expresses what it seems to state: a thoughtful practice, wrapped without almost any creases. At the same time, being the revival of something that has never died, their painting seems exactly what expresses: a haunted experience, a realm of subjectivity, ravaged. Not incidentally, one of the concepts that could define it is of a Freudian origin – the uncanny (strange, unfamiliar, eerie, odd).
An expression originating in Japanese robotics, the uncanny valley represents the transposition of the psychic dynamic in the very core of the confrontation of that which is human and alive with that which is inhuman and lifeless (the origin of the expression being the cohabitation of the man and the machine). The uncanny, already mentioned in connection with the sixties' painting, i.e. after one of its death experiences (the moment asserted "a failed, dead environment" when talking about painting) – first carries the meaning of what would be, in secret, something well-known to us – therefore alive, but sinister, unbearable, and therefore repressed – "born" dead. And secondly, it signifies something of the inner self, of our own, well-known, long-established and familiar, that, even if forcefully choked, deeply clogged by ourselves, comes back, reoccurs and appears irremovably in front of the subject. It comes back to life.
Uncanny is the robot placed behind the appearance, the flesh prosthesis which begins to move through thousands of artificial nerves, spread all over the veins and muscles, the stranger which is teeming underneath the skin, the dead from inside and the living that is screaming underground. Uncanny is the monster that cannot get out of that place (we all know where that is), and therefore is haunting around the pores like a stench, conferring the human being with an aura of a horrible creature, crippled, monstrous. A sensed atmosphere, vaguely prefigured through an authentic painting technique into Betuker Istvan's imagery, while in Veres Szabolcs' paintings, the atmosphere is striking, with the copious violence of a macabre portraiture.
If what's in front of our eyes has been so well internalized and biased, brought into the human sphere through figurativeness (in the painting of the first two), why does it seem – and is – so very sinister? Because, as Berszan Zsolt figures it, abstracting, radicalizing the problem in painting terms, the familiar that is the most strange to us, the most approachable unknown for us is the dark black of death. The uncanny is the remembrance of the death we fear, the confrontation with what we do not want to acknowledge, even if we are fully aware of it: the black that, sooner or later, swallows all colors.

Adriana Oprea
art critic
researcher in contemporary art
archivist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art
Bucharest

Gil, Galerie Popy Arvani, Paris

With GIL, Istvan BETUKER inaugurates a new cycle of paintings which reinterpret the themes of the portrait, between human figure and animal figure.
If the portrait represents the pictorial genre reserved exclusively to the advent of the subject, what about when GIL is a portrait of the painter's cat? Subject of the painting or a subject in itself?
The artist questions the limits of the human and the animal not according to the current terms of genetic manipulation, as revealed by the work of several contemporary artists, but according to the codes of pictorial representation that is an encounter of intimacy with intimacy. In these paintings, GIL's look, phosphorescent and impenetrable, endorses the full psychological depth of human subjects that, in their everyday world, invent strange gestures. In these ambiances of somber tones crossed by sudden bright tensions, comes the immanence of painting as a repository of a secret emotional depth.
GIL's look incarnates the reflection which the painter poses on the world and the beings; it is the painter's look and a metaphor for the paradox of painting. The works of Istvan BETUKER, endowed with a rare artistic and human maturity, are a plastically philosophical reflection on the position of man in the world as a subjective experiment. The depthless look of the cat, as unique as the language of painting, encourages us to immerse ourselves into the pure pictorial visibility, inside the intensity of this truth.

Malvina Bompart
art historian

White Project, Pescara

István Betuker was born in 1984 under the Communist regime and grew up in Satu-Mare, Romania. He lives in Cluj Napoca. Even though he is still young, this is why we can sense the anxieties of certain spectres of the past in his painting. His memories of childhood experiences are now coupled with a burning desire to put these tormenting thoughts out of his mind and express the real significance of living in this world, with all its tensions. Amongst other things, he lives in a country still influenced by totalitarian reminiscences, but one which nevertheless offers some flickers of hope and encouragement that are by no means negligible.
In his paintings, he has the ability to convey some of his emotions and some atmospheres through control of his brush and through his expressiveness, which is closely bound to representation. We can see this in his intimate scenes of everyday life, where the anonymous subjects are friends of his who allow us to imagine and enjoy the moments we see before us.
They are always normal people going about their everyday activities, but they are observed with great affection, and indeed show us a sweeping vision of human vulnerability.
Each painting of his appears to have the task of imposing itself as though it were a sort of disturbance that needs to strike the observer, however sweet and tender the figures and colours may be. At first sight the work is just what it portrays, quite randomly, as though this randomness were enough to have us ignore the careful preparation of the event we see. It is almost a consecration of the author's obsessions, desires, and fetishism, obtained in paint as soon as inspiration strikes, with the pleasure of satisfying a need for stylistic solutions, burning in a magical gesture.
With a form of concreteness very different from any aesthetic mediation and delayed sublimation of art, the painting manages to transform the observer's passiveness, making him or her part of a ritual that has nothing to do with the vision or allegory, but simply with what it shows. Indeed, István Betuker's canvases do not ask to be interpreted but simply looked at.
They are generally medium-large in size, almost on the same scale as the observer, and they are strictly frontal, with the chromatic tension and the intention of their colours carefully calculated, sometimes in a similar way in a number of works.

Renato Bianchini
curator

The Errants, Galerie Popy Arvani, Paris

There is always a pause, in the blink of an eye, between the end of one movement and the beginning of another. It is the pause between the first gesture dying away in the muscles and the brain sending the command for the next. This is an abrupt state without physics, without reflexes, measured in the fragment of a moment. At this point one can begin floating, stopping time and liberated from the compulsion to stir. Just then, though, before that happens, and only for a second, the artist throws the gravitation, like a ball, to another, new and odd point of the space. The languishing body, yielding to this force, moves in that direction, and remains painted in just this way. This split second gesture-pause is what makes it onto the canvas, committing it to eternity as a snatched fragment of an unfinished and continuous series of gestures.
Looking at a painting of Betuker István one becomes aware of how the artist turns ones head this way and that. After the head, the capacity to accept also strays into uncharted territory. One ceases to believe in one's infallibility. Instead, one believes what one sees, and becomes aware of a new, mildly disturbing feel- ing generated by the models' airy peace. Most of the models al- low themselves, with closed eyes, to be swept off the canvas, but not before gently grasping the inconceivable. A few with open eyes let us peek at their moment of intimacy while breaking off from their activity, but their querying look oppresses us with our own sense of shame. A few others brush aside our searching look by ignoring us, accentuating our insufferable curiosity. Other models say, with their frighteningly distorted or utterly joyful expressions that there is no point in looking at them because it is impossible to peel any more layers of emotion off their masks.
István Betuker does not allow his subjects to be thoroughly scru- tinized, depicting many of them only from eyelevel downward, only showing half of their limbs. He consigns the secrets of his own feelings to them in the same way as others write journals or share everyday dilemmas with close confidantes.

Ferenczi Szilard
historian

The Errants, Galerie Popy Arvani, Paris

The Fragility of Painting(s). On the Works of István Betuker

1. Painting. Painting has long since returned to the fold of contemporary art, and it does not have to prove its legitimacy: its pictorial values, conceptual approaches and social content can freely be discussed. All of these can be found in the vast, noisy world of art, which is devoid of any hierarchy.
With the return of the painting something important has hap- pened: the work of art has returned to power, which has in turn generated new problems for painting to address.
Let us recall how many defining moments of art can be linked to painting. The very identity of (European) art itself is rooted in painting, from Giotto onwards. Impressionism revolutionized painting. Duchamp pitted himself against painting until he ultimately renounced to it. I do not believe, however, that he had ever truly rejected painting – it is sufficient to recall that he actually painted when he retouched the reproductions of his works.
Painting brings in its train a particular tradition of seeing: perspec- tive – the two dimensional illusion of space. It also summons up a corresponding form which is powerfully present in the history of art: the panel picture. The result of this is that painting is a subject which manifests itself in numerous different ways.
Reproductions multiply only a single surface of panel pictures. They fail to fully capture their materiality: their thickness, pro- file, the reverse side on its stretcher. Thanks to this spatial qual- ity the painting stands out, whether it be in a gallery, museum or anywhere else. This unique material quality of a painting allows it to be exhibited, touched or indeed sold.
Thus a painting can be said to be a sculpture with one painted side. This painted side enthralls the viewer, and the object which supports it recedes into the background. On the other hand, the more we observe the painting's "thickness", its consistency, the more we push seeing into the background to emphasize the desire to possess. This threatens the autonomy of the picture. Painting is compelled to dwell between these extremities.

2. The picture. Betuker senses this fragility in painting. More- over, he is preoccupied by the fragility of the period that pre- cedes seeing the painting. His paintings are iridescent.
As is commonly recognized, a painting works properly when seen from a certain distance, at right angles and in certain lighting conditions. Pictures work differently in other conditions. This is because a picture is a sculpture, not a flat image, as Greenberg identified. A painting will never remain exactly the same as it was in the studio. If a painter wishes to "insure himself" he must follow the lead of Brâncus ?i, who photographed his own sculptures to define the ideal conditions for viewing his works.
Although Betuker understands the fragility of painting, he does not insure himself against this weakness, but instead emphasizes it. In his System Failure series he exposes how the system fails – from seeing an image, through putting it down on canvas up until viewing the finished painting. Before the image falls into the trap of becoming an object, as described above, Betuker traps the image with the tools of depiction. He paints in a classical way, but regards his own methods with suspicion. He paints from models, applies perspective, forming and contrasts. Despite these classical methods something unusual happens, with the result that his classical pictures – usually of single models or compositions with few figures – differ from traditional painting.
He describes his working method thus: I take a model, turn him upside down, and I take a photo of him. I paint the picture from the photograph. Finally I turn the painting the right way up again.
The model turned upside down returns to his – anatomically and gravitationally – normal position. The viewer has been cheated. He feels something strange and uneasy related to the picture. He knows that he sees a standing man, but something is not ordinary. The changed shadows, reflexes, the mild adaptation of the body to reversed gravitation make special what should be natural. Betuker's method pokes fun at both depiction and our way of seeing. By upending his subject Betuker does not deny it, like Baselitz, but re-instates the central problem of painting: the relation between seeing and depiction.
The surface of the painting is subjected to pressure from two directions. From one perspective materiality acts to objectify the picture, while from another, the picture disintegrates materiality. Both pressures bear down upon the painted surface of the painting. The picture will enforce its own system even if it is "turned into its correct position". This system does not, however, correspond to the system of the 'picture-as-object.' Two symbiotic systems exist side by side, while permanently denying each other. The paintings of István Betuker do not return to the renaissance paradigm of picture-window, but neither do they assume a Greenberg-like "flatness" either. They accept and emphasize the fragility of the image-painting.
On the subject of pictorial tools, István Betuker dwells between flat, almost monochrome surfaces and sensually colorful brush- strokes. In keeping with its joyful character, the painted surface does not permit aggressive, signature-like gestures. These would be contrary to its intent.
A few paintings allude to old photographs. It is not its atmo- sphere, nor the depicted image which are the source of this re- semblance, but the light of the painting, which seems to be above the picture. Like photos taken with silver gelatine, which have a silver iridescence on the surface, these paintings are also irides- cent, thus preventing us from being absorbed into the picture. They consciously hold us on the surface of the painting, remind- ing us of the dual nature of the image/painting.

Szekely Sebestyen Gyorgy
art historian and art critic