Góth Martin's latest solo exhibition creates an intense dialogue between the interlocking structures of vision, cognition, and painting- with the precision of surgical technique.
Martin Góth: Slowly Painted Dramatic Metaphysics
May 7 — May 19, 2025
17 Belgrád rakpart (Hungarian Photographic Association), Budapest
In this meticulously composed body of work, metaphysics emerges not only as an abstract philosophical concept, but also as a performative act: an aesthetic staging of dramatized visual worlds where ordinary elements of everyday reality merge with otherworldly suspicions and liminal experiences.
Góth's paintings achieve this by treating seemingly inanimate objects as living protagonists, and pictorial space as a vibrant theatrical stage. The sharply contoured, hard-edge forms reminiscent of robotic arms can be viewed as allegorical extensions of the tools that produced them - pencil, scalpel, and box cutter. The compositions in his recent work are no longer determined by the grid structures of pixel-based reality, but rather by the visual language of pittura metafisica, particularly Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, Dalí's dreamlike logic, and Munch's expressive isolation. Yet these coolly refined surfaces remain deeply connected to the absurd realities of our contemporary visual cultures.
This exhibition's iconographic exploration of 21st-century post-digital culture no longer unfolds solely within the grid structures dividing the pictorial field. The paintings often extend beyond their own strict flatness, incorporating three-dimensional, installative elements derived from their internal visual logic. These pieces engage in constant communication- with the exhibition space, with details of other paintings, with themselves, and with each other.
We might also say they engage in a continuously flickering, staccato-like movement, much like the bouncing sports balls that populate the works-objects that allegorize the restlessly shifting gaze of the viewer, forced into perpetual motion. These balls, as objectified stand-ins for a bodiless eye, frequently leap out of one picture frame only to reappear in another-linked together like a golden path in a waterside sunset or as a solitary polka-dot sphere that has escaped to another point in the exhibition. And yet, these images do not explore the metaphysics of the soul or conduct a deep psychoanalytic excavation of the unconscious. Rather, they sketch a mechanical worldview driven by a cybernetic superego - one without humans - populated by organs without bodies and machinic bodies without organs. These entities appear as diagrammatic figures, force vectors, and directional arrows. Their philosophical foundations can be traced back to early modernity, especially to the thought of Leibniz or Descartes' Treatise on Man. In the latter, the eye, brain, and pineal gland connect as a machine-like system, laying the groundwork for a techno-scientific understanding of reality that underpins the modernist paradigm.
Running throughout the exhibition is the idea of the "mechanical theatre": a stage with no human actors, where only objects and gestures drift through cold, calculated, labyrinthine relations of presence and absence. The bouncing ball, the suspended motion, the frozen instant of perception- all constitute a visual syntax in Góth's work that evokes the dreamlike stagecraft of Bauhaus experiments by artists like Oskar Schlemmer and the architectural reveries of Italian metaphysical painting. In this context, nostalgia is not a private sentiment, but a collective emotional state contributing to the construction of a utopian worldview. Thus, Góth's newest paintings draw us again and again into the epistemological "wormholes" between seeing and understanding - into a system of perception that feels radically new yet is deeply embedded in the intellectual legacy of modernity. Here, perception is both a tool and a trap of cognition, and painting becomes the stage upon which this drama unfolds.
Text: Zsolt Miklósvölgyi
Photo: Dávid Biró