Robin Kosnas, Budapest
Images from the Exhibit “Cloud of Lines”

When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination.

My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “What” we think, but “That” we think.

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: To project us into this thick Cloud of Unknowing.

Guy Laramee, Artist’s Statement
www.guylaramee.com

Born in 1844 in the Loire Valley, Henri Rousseau was a post impressionistic painter. Some of his most famous works were of the jungle, a place that he never actually visited. He drew his inspiration from books and botanical gardens.

In 1969 the “anonymous Czech photographer” was awarded the Overseas Press Club‘s Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage.