The world’s first idon’tknowist exhibition focuses on the latest works of Károly Keserü. The paintings and works on paper, which include colour and black-and-white (or white-and-black) compositions, are a faithful reflection of Keserü’s work, while also broadening its horizons.

Keserű Károly Keserü was born 62 years ago, in 1962, in Hungary. The latter is worth emphasising because he has travelled the globe not only personally, but also through his works. In 1986, he emigrated to Australia from Debrecen, the same city that hosted his first museum retrospective in 2023. During this time, from a young man who had once studied architecture and later worked as a technical draughtsman, he became a fine artist who was collected, represented and known on several continents.

As a viewer, we see evidence of the latter in his concrete works, which captivate us without any prior knowledge: due to the dense repetition of their colourful or colourless motifs, their compositions that seem whole from the distance, or their cavalcades of precise dots up close. Yet, these same works can not only have an impact on us visually but also start making some sense (presumably intentionally limited by the artist), if we know the artist’s extremely diverse background.

Keserü’s technical and geometric knowledge was acquired through his early studies and work, deciding to turn towards autonomous art when already in Melbourne, studying fine arts there and in London, where he conducted his research on repetition. His mature style of work, based on said repetition, is influenced by such diverse factors as her memory of her mother making folk embroideries and the Aboriginal dot painting technique, approach, discovered by him in Australia. He draws much of his inspiration from the great European modernist artists of the 20th century (Kazemir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee), as well as from the American abstract expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jules Olitzky, Alfred Jensen, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin). In his opinion, the movements led by the listed names, despite their innovative impact, moved on too quickly, leaving their central ideas unresolved, hence the reason why in some of his series he himself attempts to continue and update these (Papertiger, 2009-2012, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London).

Although it may seem contradictory at first glance, Keserü, who considers himself a formalist, is further influenced by Dadaism and the work of John Cage. Thus, one might assume, correctly, that he also gives humour and chance a significant role, just as music cannot be separated from his work, since he almost always works under its influence, but not directly from it – yet rhythmicity, and its variations are at least subliminally present in all his work. Moreover, his relationship with music is not merely unidirectional, but also mutual, as several musicians not only own an artwork from Keserü, but some were also inspired by it to create specific musical piece.

Despite the first impression of an analytical, mathematical visuality, Keserü’s works are not mechanical due to the seemingly uniform and calculated but individually and manually applied system of visual cues, as the seemingly endless repetition of the signs themselves – and the meticulous creative gestures behind them – is perhaps the most fitting analogy for the human condition and existence: over and over again, day after day, at least the same, but preferably better.

But the works ofKeserű Károly Keserü, on the other hand, can be truly considered mechanical in the sense that the artist is able to synthesize a multitude of different influences and sources into a coherent oeuvre, be it Hungarian, indigenous, ethnographic, of fine art, literary, avant-garde or mundane, creating primary images in which, after being immersed for a short time, we are surprised (and even slightly disappointed) to find that the dots, lines and other elements do not continue on the walls of the exhibition space, in the air or on the viewers.