150x100 cm, oil canvas, 2021

His painting and photographic work, born in recent years, focuses on the urban environment and building. The robustness and style of the multi-storey residential or office blocks that appear in his paintings make it impossible to feel at home, yet these buildings provide a safe living space in an urban setting. From the solitude of KristofLab’s empty buildings, an abandoned and safe urban existence returns. 

The works are dominated by buildings that we remain unnoticed in our every day life: no monuments, no historical or cultural significance, their designer has not won awards, yet they have a peculiar aesthetic of everyday life. They become invisible and dissolve in urban tissue in the same way that the crowd moving between them becomes faceless and monotonous. KristofLab captures the point of view of the city where there are no individuals, only characters that can face us anywhere in the world.


This is also emphasized by the constructivist pictorial solutions of his paintings. The use of unnatural, homogeneous colors removes the viewer from the gloomier reality and lends playfulness to the images with the vividness of the colors. Viewed from here, with all its absurdity, the urban medium seems like a huge playground. This free play of viewing is disrupted by visual elements that evoke digital distortion and screen error in paintings and photos. 

According to KristofLab’s pictures, there is a kind of disorder in our present society. In his works, nature also breaks into the products of civilization, which, accompanied by his will to live, haunts as a phantom in places from which he was in fact excluded by humanity.

Luca Cserhalmi - esthete, head of the Godot Labor Gallery

Wrong Data 2021 Paris N01

Wrong Data 2021 Berlin N01

150x100 cm, oil canvas, 2020

His painting and photographic work, born in recent years, focuses on the urban environment and building. The robustness and style of the multi-storey residential or office blocks that appear in his paintings make it impossible to feel at home, yet these buildings provide a safe living space in an urban setting. From the solitude of KristofLab’s empty buildings, an abandoned and safe urban existence returns. 

The works are dominated by buildings that we remain unnoticed in our every day life: no monuments, no historical or cultural significance, their designer has not won awards, yet they have a peculiar aesthetic of everyday life. They become invisible and dissolve in urban tissue in the same way that the crowd moving between them becomes faceless and monotonous. KristofLab captures the point of view of the city where there are no individuals, only characters that can face us anywhere in the world.


This is also emphasized by the constructivist pictorial solutions of his paintings. The use of unnatural, homogeneous colors removes the viewer from the gloomier reality and lends playfulness to the images with the vividness of the colors. Viewed from here, with all its absurdity, the urban medium seems like a huge playground. This free play of viewing is disrupted by visual elements that evoke digital distortion and screen error in paintings and photos. 

According to KristofLab’s pictures, there is a kind of disorder in our present society. In his works, nature also breaks into the products of civilization, which, accompanied by his will to live, haunts as a phantom in places from which he was in fact excluded by humanity.

Luca Cserhalmi - esthete, head of the Godot Labor Gallery

Wrong Data 2020 Madrid

Wrong Data 2020 London

The situation created by the Covid-19 virus results in the vacancy of previously busy spaces. The world stops, people stay at home. A kind of error occurred in life, the emptiness of this special situation. The problem was caused by human activity. The pandemic situation is in connection with our way of life, traveling, globalisation, trading, which connects distant places. Human activity not only creates a network of connections between countries, but also results in the exploitation of our planet’s energy resources. As a result of frozen globalisation, carbon-dioxid emission have dropped drastically, and our biological footprint has declined in a short time. Empty spaces are a witness of our overworked, energy-wasting lives, and the reduction of these errors shows that we need to change our way of life globally, otherwise situations like this will become more common.

Explanation of the series:
At the end of February, I visited the ARCO Madrid fair in Madrid, and right after i returned to Budapest the epidemic has become very serious. My artist friend from Madrid sent photos of the empty city, which i has developed further and the first piece of the series was created. Subsequently, I received photos from many parts of the world through a tender. From artists who helpd to continue the series in a co-production, this creatied a world-wide work that symbolises the collaboration of artists and at the same time draws attention to the defects in the functioning of our society, which we must reevaluate to avoid a similar situation.

WRONG DATA / empty space – 2020 | Photo series 50×50 cm

Contributors (Photos): Kiszner Édua, Antal István, Marcin Idźkowski, Angela Galvan, Gasquk, Kristijonas Dirse, Peter Korcek, Erhan US, Ciro Di Fiore, Elena Kilina, Sangeeth Aiyappa, Vladimir Stepanchenko, Raki Nikahetiya, David Leshem, 
and the original video – Haccoun Myriam

(all photo on my website)

WRONG DATA / empty space

Installation (painting, laser cut plexiglass, webcam, projector)

The Abandoned Military Buildings series, as the title suggests, revives the world of abandoned military facilities. The buildings left here as dark memories of the past appear in forgotten places, often reclaimed by nature. KristofLab’s paintings look like black scars on structures that have lost their function, threatening to break the almost Edenian, idealistic landscapes. In the central installation, the imaging possibilities of the past and the present meet: an image made with a traditional painting process is displayed on the object next to it with the help of a webcam and a projector, creating a ghost spectacle, as we often cannot perceive the presence of abandoned military facilities as reality. 

Luca Cserhalmi - esthete, head of the Godot Labor Gallery

“In the twentieth century, humanity has transformed its environment to an ever greater extent. One of our memories of this are the abandoned military concrete bunkers found in places remote from civilization. And there are countless other buildings that have lost their function, and nature has begun to recapture them over time. Think of the residential parks of Chernobyl, or the sunken ships that have been transformed into coral reefs, thus becoming habitats for various aquatic animals. These buildings stand in front of us as mementos, reminiscent of former devastation. 

The works, although dealing with the subject of war, primarily examine the phenomenon as an impact on and destruction of the environment, and thus they are free from political stance. The emphasis is on the meeting of civilization and nature. 

In William Turner’s Steamboat in a Snowstorm, the forces of nature still dominate humanity’s technology defying the sea, but in the works of the Abandoned Military Bulidings series and in our time, the situation has already reversed, as reflected in the technical solution of the central installation. The landscape observed by the webcam is projected onto a board of military fortifications cut out of black plexiglass, creating a digitized projection of reality. The work contrasts the traditional oil on canvas and the XXI. century imaging tools, yet the art forms complement each other and create a new coexistence, doing so in a way that the work reinterprets traditional landscape painting. 

In addition to the work on anti-aircraft batteries (Maunsell sea forts) on the English Channel, two other paintings appear in the installation. One depicts the pyramid of the Nekoma Center, a memento of the fear of the Cold War atomic apocalypse, while the other shows the remains of the control “tower” of an abandoned airport in the California desert. 

Traces of tense twentieth-century history can be found everywhere, from the sea to through the desert to the sloping fields. Painted or plexiglass-cut constructions, stripped down, wedge into a seemingly inappropriate medium and, like a black box, set a grim memory of our recent violent, destructive, and hostile-filled moments, warning us of the excesses of our civilization.”

KristofLab


Abandoned military buildings

The works show a city life image with characteristic constructions. The images that carry the deformation marks have been inspired by the observation of the city’s surroundings, but the works created by the transformations contain a peculiar vision. The panel house reflects our urbanistic living space. Observing the environment shows an aesthetic orientation, with the different stacking layers changing the original content of the starting point.

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KristofLab Kristóf Szabó

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