Barnabás Földesi's solo exhibition at Tokaj Art Wine Gallery in Budapest.

Barnabás Földesi: “An Island and a Lifebelt”
22 October – 23 November , 2025
Text: Renáta Gallai, Budapest-based curator
Tokaj Art Wine Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

Barnabás Földesi’s painting unfolds in the space where gesture, tradition, and contemporary visuality meet. His artistic stance thrives on the tension between inherited mentorship, personal experience, and the search for an autonomous voice. The influence of Ilona Keserü, still palpable today, is not a matter of imitation but of freedom — the instinctive treatment of colour and form, the living rhythm of gesture.
A defining aspect of Földesi’s practice is his devotion to the analog process: he creates the illusion of digital precision entirely by hand. No software, no pre-planned design — each layer, line, and masking is manually applied. Thus, the geometric clarity of his compositions emerges not from mechanical accuracy but from movement, coincidence, and intuition.
His works grow through layering — numbers, letters, and colour fields overlap, generating an organic structure in which intention and accident continually reshape one another. The large montage-like canvases hide countless pictorial fragments; some later become independent works, isolated and magnified within fields of colour.
The title An Island and a Lifebelt serves as a metaphor for Földesi’s painterly existence. Amid the vast sea of visual noise, each painting rises like an island, and the act of painting itself becomes the lifebelt — the gesture that rescues, connects, and sustains. His art does not mirror the oversaturation of images in contemporary culture; it reorders them, creating a space where silence and human sensitivity can emerge.
Drawing from the collective visual memory of our age, yet grounded in deeply personal experience, these works map an inner landscape — both refuge and orientation point, an island and a lifebelt in the sea of the present.