ONTOGENESIS - Video Installation 2015.

The exhibition was preceded by a three-year research period that I summarized in A figyelem
útjai/The Paths of Attention project, showing the results of my research through numerous solo and
group exhibitions (Óbudai Társaskör Gallery 2014; MODEM – Szabadkéz/Free Hand 2014; A38 Ship
2015). Following the method developed during the project, the paintings and graphics that were
created parallel to the multi-channel animation are also on display at Museum Kiscell.
The multi-channel painting animation gives us the opportunity to extend the film’s temporal narrative into
the multiple directions of space. This way, one can make processes, convergent or divergent movements palpable.
The travel between the locations appearing on the three projections is actually an analogy. The movements,
rising and descending horizontally and vertically, forwards and backwards, may invoke in the viewer a
wide variety of the states of being. The artistic intention was not to express personal experiences, but to provide
a spiritual vehicle for the journey of absorption and meditation from the personal to the universal. The
self-reflexivity of art promises a potential ontological model; for philosophical contemplation, art could provide
a tool for a certain kind of spiritual practice.
Therefore, the paintings and animations of The Paths of Attention project follow the process of intelligent
seeing. The painting is born at the focus of artistic attention, and serves as the focus of the audience’s attention.
This is the unchanging center of the manifold mental and physical movements of the creation-reception
dynamic. The lack of movement suggests lack of temporality: no matter how many times we return to the
image, it remains the same. Its sameness is, however, not a dead obtuseness, but the footprint of several previous
mental and physical movements. Thoughts, realizations and emotions that either the conscious or the
instinctive movements of painting have turned into a visible object. Through the reception of the painting,
the epistemological and operative senses are re-activated. If the work of art deeply touches the viewer, then
– even if only for a moment – the immobility of the painting can turn into inner experience. Blissful silence –
living immobility. This is the kind of experience towards which the creative process is – willingly or unwillingly
– oriented. Painting, therefore, encourages us to experience a state outside temporality.
In this current project, the process described above seems to turn back on itself, as animation makes it possible
to track the formation of spatiality and rhythm, evolving temporally. Primarily, I became interested in animating
the image, in making it “come to life”, because I wanted to make the painting, and the coefficients of
the invisible forces creating the painting – the workings of attention, concentration, inspiration, conscious imagination
and visualization – transparent. This form of self-reflection, through the examination of art’s origins,
guides the onlooker back to the question of the origin of existence. This is what the two shades of meaning of
the title Ontogenesis allude to: understood literally, this compound word of Greek origin means “the creation
of life”. In the natural sciences, however, “ontogenesis” specifically means the development of an organism. This
crosstalk also resonates with the interaction between existence and the individual. The Hungarian subtitle –
Részesülni a létben/Participation in Being – alludes to this.
The most universal questions are also the ones that affect us the most personally. “Why and how did the
world I see come to be?” “How is it possible that I am and that I can see and imagine the world?” It is the nature
of the question of being and the Absolute that it can never be fully answered. But that is not the point.
The point is to ask the question over and over again, so that this meditative research can bring us closer to
the source of every form of being.

Attila Kondor