Alexander Gyenes: Brain Fog, Constellations

Advanced Astrophotography

Free to visit
April 22, 2022 – June 18, 2022
Monday–Saturday: 9am–7pm
Closed on Sunday and on public holidays.
Capa Központ – 8F Gallery
Curator: Emese Mucsi

Brain fog has turned into some sort of a buzzword recently; we have heard of quite a few strange diagnoses and personal stories about the way this curious aftermath of COVID-19 has affected the human brain. The neurological symptoms reported by those people who suffered from a state of brain fog evading their mental space include episodes of memory loss, forgetfulness, and general dizziness. The inclusion of this concept in the title of the latest exhibition by San Francisco-based biochemist and artist Alexander Gyenes is, on one hand, a reference to the period (2019–2022) in which the artworks now on view at the Capa Center were created. On the other, it is a repetition, on a small scale, of a creative act which is also present in an enormous cycle of artworks (The Tycho Project, 2019–) that Gyenes has been working on for years. Gyenes creates settings which are similar to the ones we find in scientific experiments in his curious barn-turned-art studio in the Gold Country of California. He produces artworks and photographs to capture his proper and semi-proper scientific observations in these frameworks/settings. As a researcher, Gyenes worked in the field of nanotechnology, specializing in the measurement of light reflection which provides the basis for determining the size of molecules. In his parallel life, as an artist, he has been strongly influenced by his scientific career: in his works of artistic autonomy, he has used and misused the methods of scientific research in various peculiar ways. Still to this day, his approach to photography recalls the freely experimenting attitude of the early days of photography and presents the air of a 19th-century astronomer, mathematician, chemist, or alchemist seeking to take advantage of the new prospects presented by the emergence of photography in the pursuit of a host of different aims by applying and reapplying old and new methods, techniques, and materials. His singular, holistic worldview is manifest in the observations carried out in his barn/studio: The artist’s studio is his creative workspace, and every inch of it is covered by projections of his thoughts. The barn, however, is an even more complex space: it is some sort of a world model. In the photographs taken of the displays of light on the barn’s galvanized walls, we get to see how the most mundane view transforms into an interstellar panorama and cosmic fog.

Emese Mucsi
curator