The Peeled City (I)

The explorations of Attila Csörgő have a scientific connection, especially with geometry. The artist is known for his DIY kinetic constructions which refer to the relations between the Platonic forms – regular polyhedrons. The attitude of the artist is combined here with that of a researcher, intuition intertwines with experimentation, and science with the humanities. Like many artists, past or present, who relate to the scientific experience in their artistic endeavours, Csörgő does not see such practice as a goal in itself but as a continuous intellectual adventure.

The works from the Peeled Spaces series are a reference to a seemingly banal activity of orange peeling. In one of his comments, the artist defines it as “kitchen geometry”: peeling the skin off the fruit he saw as the best method of transforming a 3-dimensional object into a 2-dimensional equivalent.* When placed flat on a surface, the orange peel is, to an effect, a total presentation of the fruit from above, the front, and from the side – the ideal execution of the programme of Paul Cézanne and the Cubists, who drew on his achievements.

Peeled City (I) shows the artist standing on a roof of one of New York skyscrapers and “peeling” a miniature building resembling a modernist American high-rise. He manages to transform the edifice into a flat shape, no longer really resembling the original structure. The work was, on the one hand, a reflection on geometry as a method of describing the world and, on the other, on the conditions of perception and the possibilities of transferring three dimensions into two, on changing the spatial form into a flat one (the artist is also interested in experiments in the other direction). The whole undertaking is an exercise in intuition, manual skills, and imagination, so that it is possible to see the building holistically, from every side. Whilst peeling a spherical shape and preserving the integrity of the skin is not that big of a challenge, the “flattening” of the angular form of a skyscraper is more problematic. “If we peel such a form in a circular motion, as if we were peeling an orange, not only along the edges but also the flat surfaces, then we just might succeed,” says the artist.

Izabela Kopania

*  Attila Csörgő’s comments come from the press materials to his exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (27 February – 15 May 2011).