"The Thing” is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time

(Julia Kristeva)

The exhibition project "Substratum" signed by Zsolt Berszán continues his artistic research from the previous solo shows “Dissecting the Unknown” (2015), "Residuum" (2014), "ABlackJECTION" (2013), in which the obsession with black silicone or oil became a coagulating mass that turned into various forms and structures.

“Substratum” is a surface or a material on or from which an organism lives, grows or obtains its nourishment. Zsolt Berszán treats the first layer of the drawing as a substrate, as a surface on which something is deposited or inscribed. In this way the multiple layers of silicone or adhesive forms structures which remind us of the integrated circuits or human internal organs. Large-scale canvas drawings arise from a multi-layered hatch, with dense accumulations of black amorphous forms trapped in motion. There is a feeling of fluidity almost imperceptible in his works. Organic forms arise from the accumulation of layers and substrates that send to the primordial boom in which the violence of separation has given birth to matter and existence. It is the moment when the conscious and the unconscious have not yet begun, the moment when the human and animal ideas have not yet arisen, where "me" and "the other" is not yet separated[2].

It is a disruption of the system, order, a violation of the limits that draws attention to the "fragility of life". The confrontation with the materiality of Berszán's works goes to the idea of the beginning of life, but also to the end, to death. The organic nature of the used materials transmits a sense of strangeness, a mystery exploring the primordial boom, the moment of awareness of the real existence and the rejection of death. It is the fight of the individual against his own dissolution.

Death appears as a biological state of sequencing and integration. According to Ferenczi's concept, the tendency of human beings to fragmentation and disintegration is an expression of the force of death: “The early ego largely lacks cohesion, and a tendency towards integration alternates with a tendency towards disintegration, a falling into bite… the anxiety of being destroyed from within remains active. It seems to me in keeping with the lack of cohesiveness that under the pressure of this threat the ego tends to fall into pieces”[3]. Freud postulates that there is no representation of death in the unconscious, just as he does not know the denial, so the unconscious knows no death[4].

In the abstract paintings signed by Zsolt Berszán, with intricacies of lines and fabrics, the viewer deciphers the dissociation or a non-integration of psychic and somatic unity. It is a dissociation of the form in itself when the form is distorted, abstracted, disfigured or hollowed out.