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Street art on the walls of Budapest gallery

The first time I saw Attila Stark`s work was at the Bucharest Art Biennale last year, where his favorite character - the monkey - was multiplied across the walls of decrepit buildings.

He`d never been to Bucharest before, but first impressions sometimes matter most, and his unsophisticated but witty contours, inspired by the Romanian capital itself - as well as by the existing graffiti `tags` and images drawn all over the city center`s buildings long before he`d arrived - formulated a fresh perspective of a city I thought I knew well.

Local distress?

Possibly much to the distress of the local authorities, Stark`s sharp comments on city life can now be seen in Budapest as well, on the walls of places like Tűzraktár and Kultiplex. There, the monkey takes center stage once again, among his collection of other, often intriguing characters.

Whereas some might qualify scribbling on walls as an `illegal activity,` art historians are quick to call Stark`s humorous, ironic drawings `street-art activism` or the sort of graphic art that marks the next stage of development in Hungarian urban art because of its creative originality.

Some media have already described the 28-year-old as the first `celebrity` of Hungarian graffiti art - not an overstatement if you consider the fact that, since 1998, Stark, who graduated in 2004 in graphic art from Budapest`s University of Applied Arts, has taken part in numerous group- and solo-exhibitions at home and abroad.

His graduation work, Kulo-City Comics, a diary in which the young man`s stream of consciousness was translated into drawings, was not only praised by teachers and art historians, but has already been exhibited at several galleries in Budapest.

Moreover, Kulo-City is about to be published as a book by the Roham Publishing Company. The exhibition at kArton Gallery shows some of Stark`s latest work, but samples of his diary drawings are also on display upstairs. The artist, who doesn`t seem to like talking about his art, told me that the new work on large canvases was executed at the request of a collector.

No big message

On the press release, however, Stark muses on his reluctance to explain the drawings.

`There is no big message, only the smell of paint, the studio, the tools.... I don`t like to think while painting, I prefer to let myself be; I think the images don`t come from me, they only come through me.... And I can`t tell you why it`s monkeys, but I like their ears, their gums, their eyes, their grimaces and movements.`

Stark`s vividly colored and expressive monkeys are alone or in groups, and their world is multilingual (Stark gives them not only Hungarian but English and Spanish words in strip cartoon-like bubbles), and urban.

Some of his city landscapes titled Chicago depict skyscrapers, although the artist says that he had not been to the United States when he drew them.

The symbols of Hungarian urban subculture seem now to be partly determined by Stark, because of his characteristic, original portrayal of various aspects of city living.

But his profound preoccupation with the life of city youth stems, perhaps, from his not belonging to it.

The Baja-born artist confesses to his deep attachment to the town of his birth, and to the Hungarian puszta.

While obsessively depicting city existence, Stark`s work also suggests a certain detachment from the party life of cool records and joint-rolling led by some of his euphemistic monkeys, and highlights the characteristically urban feeling of alienation, which many of his solitary, lonely-looking monkeys convey so acutely.



Stark Attila

kArton Gallery

Alkotmány utca 18.

Pest, District V.

Mon-Fri 1pm-6pm

Sat 10am-1pm

www.karton.hu



Andreea Anca
www.budapestsun.com - Wednesday, April 11, 2007