SUN’s OUT – WINDOWS’s OPEN – Levente Szücs

Opening: 10th of April, 7 pm

Galerie Reinisch, Hauptplatz 6, Graz

Introduction: Manuela Schlossinger

The artist is present.

Closing event with an artist talk: Wednesday, May 13, 2016, at 5:30 p.m.

The discussion will be led by Karin Bucher-Trantow, Levente Szücs, and Manuela Schlossinger

With “Sun’s Out – Window’s Open,” Reinisch gallery presents the third solo exhibition of Levente Szücs. The title reads like a simple, almost everyday observation—and at the same time opens up a space for reflection. It describes a moment of pause and perception, a shift from the interior to the exterior, from the closed to the open.

At the heart of the exhibition are two groups of works that engage in different ways with nature, image, and perception. In the further development of the “Augmented Nature” series, Szűcs combines photographic motifs with painting to create multi-layered pictorial spaces. These are based on his own photographs of landscapes and, in particular, forest scenes—motifs that have always served as projection surfaces for moods, memories, and imaginings.
Using a specially developed pigment transfer technique, the artist applies these photographs to the canvas. The image does not appear as a solid surface, but as a translucent layer—almost like a memory or an afterimage. Underlying glazed areas of color begin to glow, while above them a gestural, impasto-like painting with broad brushstrokes reaches into the space. The motif is not covered up, but penetrated and expanded.
It is precisely in this interplay that the special quality of the works lies: reality and abstraction are not in opposition, but merge into one another. The result is visual spaces that cannot be clearly defined—open, multi-layered, and in constant motion. Without digital means, Szűcs develops his own form of “expansion”: the images appear as passageways or transitions that direct the gaze toward a different, personal reality.

A second group of works, developed specifically for this exhibition, strikes a calmer, almost intimate tone. Drawing on historical 18th-century xylotheques— collections intended to systematically document trees—Szücs creates poetic book objects. In them, the artist dedicates himself to individual trees in the form of sensitive portraits. These objects also include painted aluminum sheets whose surfaces are artistically fragmented. Here, too, the boundaries between representation and artistic conception blur. As one leafs through them, a slow, concentrated approach unfolds—a way of seeing in stages that takes time.
These works stand in deliberate contrast to the fast-paced, often fleeting visual world of the present. They invite us to pause, look more closely, and engage in a quiet, focused form of perception. Nature appears not merely as a motif, but as a space of experience—as something situated between the external world and what the artist seeks to make accessible to us through his inner experience.

Thus, the exhibition connects both groups of works into an open structure: between painting and object, between gesture and structure, between immediate impression and reflective perception. “Sun’s Out – Window’S Open” thus becomes an invitation to take time—for seeing, for experiencing, and for the subtle transitions in between.

Manuela Schlossinger