Karinka Szabo-Detchart 

STRUCTURAL NATURE

Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute 

from August 16 to September 17, 2017  

Theorist and practitioner Karinka Szabo-Detchart enjoys conceptualizing and concretizing. Think and do. Because one cannot do without the other.  

His work is rooted at the edge of art, architecture and nature. The artist pushes reflection beyond established borders and seeks to dislodge the origin of forms.  

Isn't nature the matrix of all structures, the first form?  

The framework is characteristic of nature, not that of human thought, sclerosing and talkative; this is the purpose of the artist who frees himself from intellectual schemes, frees spaces, transforms looks and opens the mind.  

The exhibition is a stroll through three majestic elements which symbolize a fusion between art, nature and architecture.  

The works which never lose the thread of thought, evoke plant forms: rhizomes in networks, aerial roots, giant fern which unfolds in ribbon. We move around in the middle of these wooden architectures that mimic nature. One hides there, sneaks in, lodges there as in a protective nest and one is astonished. Nature is protective but also dangerous. She is a den-refuge armed with threatening claws. Only his heart is comforting. It is he that we must seek.  

The sculptures therefore initiate a dialogue between disciplines, a new conversation that articulates the living and the stable and proposes a natural architecture.  

On the walls, two-dimensional works underline the fragile and rebellious relationship between art, architecture and nature. Is it a chaos, a state of war? Or on the contrary an explosion, a metamorphosis?  

To keep only the purity and simplicity of the initial impetus, the artist carved the wood by hand. This first gesture is thoughtless, mechanical and abandons itself to movement.  

Karinka Szabo-Detchart questions  primitivism and seeks to get back to basics,  to the brutality of the first jolt, to move forward, to find something fundamental and universal, a form of expression, a new language that would combine naturalness and architecture.  

Humanity is at the crossroads of intuition and thought. Karinka Szabo-Detchart's works capture this duality, this mixture. The artist seeks this point of balance and tension between fierce nature and rigorous structure.  

Where architecture  traps movement in a fixed structure, the plant keeps  in its heart, like a buried treasure, a thinking, mobile and living matter. A vibrant beat that art captures to build a new spatial morphology and reveal wild thought.  

Nature is the geography that we have to think about in order to build other artistic forms.  

Karinka Szabo-Detchart's works are metaphysical and poetic. By contemplating them, we understand that artistic thought is an impulse of life.  

Sophie Geoffrion  

Philosopher