TACTICAL – Solo show at Artkartell Projectspace / 2024
Curated by Gabor Rieder
Photos by Istvan Andras Juhasz
István Dukai bases his visual art program on the tactical principle of destruction. He begins constructing his distinctive black patterns from emotional impulses or visual elements. To the monotonously repetitive rhythm of techno’s four-on-the-floor beat, thin bands of lines take shape on the computer screen as concentrically multiplying emblematic forms. These aesthetically pared-down, empty graphic logo-signs, arranged in perfect symmetry, at times evoke black-toned industrial minimalism, at others the world of op art lost among moiré grids.Across the bands of these inward-turning, rounded emblems, meaning without a sign runs the way the stylus of a record player moves through the industrially etched grooves of a blank vinyl record. Having stepped out of the world of commercial graphic design, Dukai distorts these perfectly constructed ideal emblems with the help of computer drawing software: he disrupts the pattern, lets it bleed, or breaks it apart. He then paints the newly created, personalized signs produced through this process onto the surfaces of his panel paintings using plotter-cut stencils and black acrylic spray paint. The supports are raw materials tied to Dukai’s rural Serbian childhood: knotted, coarse sackcloth or military tarpaulins. He subjects the finished surfaces to various physically destructive processes: sandwashing, soaking, rubbing, or chemical treatment.
Dukai’s exhibition at Artkartell projectspace presents a selection from the past four years of his work. Large-scale paintings are shown side by side whose cross motifs evoke the standardized aesthetics of military cemeteries. The striped crosses of the 2020 diptych Sanctitas and the 2022 triptych Intertia disintegrate under the software’s distorting filter, then undergo further destruction on physically worn, faded military tarpaulins and tent cloths which, like tamed modern-day homespun textiles, surrounded Dukai during his childhood in the time of the Kosovo wars of the 1990s. In the 2024 series Quatour, he applied mirror-symmetrical, damaged op-art emblems onto tactical tarpaulins that had been treated with bleach and chlorine to remove bloodstains. “As small children in Oromhegyes, Vojvodina,” he recalled, “we were surrounded by war; many acquaintances and relatives were called up, tanks arrived, and the NATO bombings were underway. For several months there was no electricity or water supply, yet as a child I still experienced it as a strange kind of game; it brought people together. When the air-raid siren sounded, we all went down together into the shelter, where by candlelight we cracked walnuts and slept among military canvases. There were tarpaulins like these everywhere, even on horse-drawn carts; they became part of everyday village life. In retrospect I am trying to demilitarize them, as I come to realize their true past.” The recycled military raw materials collected at Serbian flea markets are at once nostalgic recollections and a confrontation with the destructive reality of wartime tragedies. Alongside the military canvases—interwoven with the delicate threads of meaning of a dramatic awakening—the exhibition also presents Dukai’s other raw materials, from tanned untreated canvases to worn steel-sheet tiles and found iron plates crumbling with rust.
