STATEMENT OF WORK

In his drawings, Gabor Bata explores social alienation — and how it transforms us – through

the visual language of cartooning. These works portray figures who have lost their humanity

and have devolved into cartoons, where pleas for sincere connection are juxtaposed against

grotesque, violent visages. In these compositions, a hypothetical world of all talkers and no

listeners is shown. The characters attempt to communicate and connect with one another, but

as they mug and scream through a ghoulish, hellish abstract haze, they consistently fail to do

so.

Despite them verging on caricature, however, Gabor still hopes to evoke sincerity through the

materiality. Bata embraces the theme of failure in the surfaces he works on, with oil pastels

thickly and crudely applied on heavily gessoed paper or canvas. In his Play Dead series, he

builds over the ink and graphite illustrations of his characters with pastel, burying them, only to

scrape the material off the surface and digging the figures back up again. It is a continual

process of hiding and freeing, breathing in and breathing out. The scrapes and scratches help

form the subjects as much as they conceal them. Bata welcomes failure as an integral facet to

the character of his work, and as the seductive colours and flowing gesso grooves indicate,

they are meant to be just as attractive as they are repulsive. These figures are still worth

looking at and engaging with, no matter how mutated and reprehensible they may be.