DÉNESH GHYCZY

Bright rooms, unobstructed views and walls made of glass have shaped representative building since the beginning of modernity. From the outside, Dénesh Ghyczy's gentle oil painting traces this light in an almost impressionistic way, which falls dramatically on the floors and walls of representative interiors. The light that always comes from outside in his works materializes in broad streets of color - the golden currency of architectural room design. The seduction of their impressionistic optics are only an external dimension of Dénesh Ghyczy's works, which often seem like the old masters in their structure and subjects. In fact, his painting series Inside Outside, which he began in 2017, is a cheeky exaggeration of a romantic-contemplative gesture towards nature, which has a long tradition in the arts.

The figures stand in the midst of Ghyczy's light-flooded interiors, often almost as small as Caspar David Friedrich put them in the immense infinity of his “cosmopolitan” landscapes. As between its melancholy skies and stripes of landscape, which slide into the immeasurable, people are mostly represented as rear views in Ghyczy's equally well-composed, but spring-bright pictures. The works of the contemporary painter, who runs his studio in Berlin, refer, like Friedrich's icons of Romanticism, to the tragically unattainable longing for a unification of all opposites.

Gridded through window struts and glass joints, we look at what is outside like a picture. Didn't we thereby degrade nature to a powerless and ineffective object of contemplation? Hasn't it become a mere supplier of visual qualities such as light and color?
The window, as Ghyczy illustrates in his metaphorically convincing work, is ultimately only a compromise between the contemplative closeness to nature and our need for protection, between the decorative presence of the landscape and its safe distance from us - and in this, the coherent punchline, it is the same but very much to painting.

Biography