I Don't Know Much About Art, But I Know What You Might Like

No matter who you are, my guess is that we have one thing in common: we're both bored to tears of me writing long articles without a single photo that trash other people, and are mostly designed to make myself seem terribly clever and hip. So at least for this week, I'm going to make it shorter and let someone else be the shrewd and stylish one. Who could possibly impress the irascible Stink enough to cause such a dramatic change in format? Some fearless politician, or famous restaurateur? Maybe, but not this week. Instead, the honors go to a relatively soft-spoken contemporary Hungarian artist by the name of Dezső Szabó.

I first came across Szabó's work early last month at the Ludwig Múzeum, among canvases by the five winners of this year's STRABAG Painting Prize, an annual contest for Hungarian painters under the age of 40. While I was surprised to find myself drawn to the works of all five - I'm a pretty tough customer when it comes to contemporary art - Szabó's three pictures pulled me in like a dog at the back door of a butcher shop.

What grabbed me most about these pieces was their transparency, both figuratively and literally. Made of carefully applied layers of colored and transparent lacquer, they look like something you'd see under the microscope at a medical laboratory. My favorite, a large canvas covered in blood-red blotches of various size and texture, looked like an atom's-eye view of vaguely unhealthy blood. (Another from the same series is pictured at right.) After just a few seconds of open-mouthed gaping, it was pretty clear that this was what it was about. No book-length, artsy-fartsy explanation needed. I almost started casing the joint to see if there was a way to get a two-meter long painting out of the place without anyone noticing.

My next run-in with Szabó came a few weeks later, at the annual Antik Enteriőr antiques and art exhibit. Trolling through the tent holding the overspill from the Műcsarnok, I suddenly spotted a very bizarre-looking oversized photograph, of several people standing in a field staring at a tornado in the distance. My first though was that I had seen the picture before in some collection of prize-winning photojournalism. Then I looked a little closer, and realized that there was something not quite right about the photo. And then I noticed the name on the small sign below it: Szabó Dezső.

As I stood there wondering what the winner of the Strabag painting prize was doing heisting famous old pictures of natural and man-made disasters - next to it was a horrifying scene of an airplane crash - a fellow in his 30s with a mischievous grin sidled up to me and let me in on a secret. The famous pictures of calamity I was looking at weren't "famous" pictures at all (at least not yet). They were all glorious fakes.

It turned out that the guy with the grin was Attila Pőcze, proprietor of the Vintage Galéria, and Szabó's dealer. "Be careful of making assumptions about what you think you are seeing," Pőcze said. He explained that the "tornado" was actually sand caught in whirlpool in a glass tank in Szabó's studio, and the field of golden wheat on which the crashed jetliner had come to rest was a fur coat. Boom.

A few days later, Szabó was walking me through a catalogue of the last dozen or so years of his work. While he has and continues to work in a variety of media, his primary focus is on creating lavish models of extraordinary things, and photographing them in a way that make them look more real than real. "It's all analogue," he explained, summing up the brilliant and (mercifully minimal) theory behind his work: In today's digitally-corrected world, what we see and what we think we are seeing are two very different things.

Meanwhile, unlike a lot of contemporary artwork out there, Szabó work's is actually grueling, meticulous work. He is currently gearing up for a 10-piece installation on terrorism, and, judging from his previous labors, he'll probably put more into it than an old master with a lavish commission for a cathedral ceiling.

So if you were wondering whether there are any interesting contemporary artists in Budapest, here's one. And since you probably spend your time doing something more remunerative than writing long and pointless opinion columns, you can probably afford to start collecting him.