Ferenc Forrai's exhibition at Várfok Gallery Project Room in Budapest.
Ferenc Forrai: Waterline – blue overlapped by white
18 February – 29 March, 2025
Várfok Project Room, Budapest
Water-driven sediment and the resulting erosion have contributed both to the natural evolution of the environment and to sustaining human civilisation. In contrast, the broader understanding of erosion includes already the anthropogenic erosion as well, where the surface-forming activities of external forces are man-made, with artificial interventions in nature that are thought to be beneficial to humans in the short term, but which in the medium to long term may irreversibly disrupt the balance of the Earth's ecosystems, especially compared to the pre-Anthropocene age.
If we upset the relationship between the elements of our habitat, our life, it will affect all the other interacting elements, man and nature - part of the whole. What we are seeing now points to the long-unfolding state of our planet.
Ferenc Forrai uses formal compositions to refer to the processes of nature, the effects of human intervention in nature: highlighting artificial intervention, he symbolically represents the external, human impact on our waters, changing their extent, quantity and quality, with negative consequences for the natural, social and physiological environment: blue overlapped by white.
The Waterline series showcased in the exhibition focuses the attention on the process of how we, as individuals and as a community, can make choices to maintain a future for ourselves and our descendants: a water-filled, liveable blue future or a polluted, exploited black one, in the absence of a green environment.
"For the past six thousand years, water has defined human civilisation, today it is human civilisation that defines the future of our waters." - András Szöllősi-Nagy, hydrologist
Ferenc Forrai was born in Szekszárd and currently lives in Budapest. He is an active member of the Artus Contemporary Art Association and works in one of the association's studios. His works are arranged in series, exploring both personal and collective experiences. He draws up social and natural phenomena with his own system of visual signs, using colour and form to abstract content into image. His graphic approach appears both in his Waterline series - on paper, often composed of delicate ink lines, and in his Square-angle series as well, the latter already materialising even on wooden panels, on a monumental scale, symbolising Central and Eastern Europe, while thematically making visible points of connection and interference.
