Zsolt Berszns work focuses on the issue of impermanence.

His works before 2010 investigate the

possibilities of alternative genesis, seeking answers to such questions as how life may be born in death, and
what perspectives open for human beings in the inhuman sphere of natures eternal circulation. His former
exhibitions usually present works that link the thought of impermanence with the motif of the maggot. As
the protagonist of the world represented by Berszn is the symbolic figure of the maggot, the human world
loses its anthropomorphic characteristics: we encounter an unknown, alien universe. These earlier works
also focused on mans struggle with death, yet they did not represent it through human figures, but rather
through the micro-world of alien life forms hiding in the dark inner spaces of the body. The maggot, the
very thought of which evokes horror in most beings, appears as the representative of renewal and the
continuity of life.

The exhibition in Venice reveals another layer of the notion of death: What happens to us after death? The
exhibited works and the site-specific installation explore the idea of decomposition with a special focus on
the human body.

According to the Christian doctrine, the human body does not stay in one piece after death, it does not
become transsublimated and does not rise to the heavens as the body of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary
did: rather, it falls into pieces, gets rotten and destroyed. This is the ultimate trauma of human life.
According to Berszns works, history also consists of parables of decomposition: it is made of stories of
wars and assassinations, that is, stories of physical decay. The oil-silicon pictures look figurative. However,
this figurativity is not based on identification or recognition, but rather on the deconstruction of the
composition. The sculptures are also subjected to the all-pervasive power of decomposition, to the erosion
of form achieved by death. Here even water, which usually symbolizes life as a motif, evokes the thought
of death. In this regard, Berszns works also reflect the town of Venice, which continuously reminds one
of the duality of life and death. Yet, the effect on the visitor is not only that of pain and horror: it is also
cathartic and uplifting. Decomposition opens the semantic field of the sacred. While it makes us witnesses
of the processes of decomposition, it also opens a path towards formulating the ultimate question: What
happens to the human soul after death?

PAINTINGS, GRAPHIC WORKS

In 1913 Malevich reduced the whole human world to two colours. Black, which stands for the density of
material, was placed in the context of white, which stands for infinity. A few decades later black was born
to a life of its own: in the 1950s the painters of American abstract expressionism recognized in it the
possibility of signifying transcendence, and started to treat it as a holy colour. In case of the
contemporary artists of black painting the reduction of colour is still accompanied by the abstraction of
objectless representation. This holds true for Berszn as well.

The large graphic works and paintings exhibited here, however, are not entirely nonfigurative. The subtle
differences in shade between black and grey seem to evoke human forms in hardly noticeable ways. The
sensitive, densely woven lines of the pencil works, and the powerful, structured surfaces of the oil-silicon
paintings create compositions that may remind one of the shapes of human corpses. Moreover, these
lifeless limbs lying around seem to be heaped together. This aspect of Berszns works makes them go
beyond the trauma of the individual human bodys decay: by way of evoking the narratives of the
Holocaust and other historical massacres, they also remind the visitor of the historical traumas preserved in
our collective memory.

Berszn approaches painting as a sculptor: on the one hand, he creates a two-dimensional visual
composition, but on the other, he produces pronounced facture and spatial surfaces. By leading his works
back to their own flatness, he eventually follows the kind of painterly self-criticism defined by Clement
Greenberg. As the back silicone he borrows from the construction industry his favourite material, the
trademark of his practice can only be applied in layers, in case of the oil-silicon paintings his method
necessarily leads to reliefs. The structurality of his surfaces is partly created by the application of several
layers, and partly by the way he puts the silicone on the canvas, as a result of his twisting bands. These
processes and methods lead to a visual world that constantly evokes the organic forms of human limbs and
inner organs. Yet, the condensed brands of silicone are accompanied on the canvas by the smeared stains of
oil paint, representing decomposition, the dissolve of forms. The dramatic quality of these works stem from
the conflict between the end-points of the world: these troubled surfaces host such contrasts as that of form
and formlessness, roughness and smoothness, saturation and emptiness life and death. In the process of
the decomposition of the decaying body these essentially different qualities of the world are continuously
conflicted and depicted.
OBJECTS

Berszn builds up the immediate environment of objects around his bodies made of black silicone: tubs,
tables, beds, a room framed by iron bars. He surrounds the forms reminiscent of human bodies with a
realistic space, and places it in a specific situation, thus producing environments that may call to mind
Georges Segals groups of sculptures or Edward Kienholzs object-collages. However, as opposed to the
realism of these genre-forming artists, Berszn produces stylized human forms: the contours of the body
following the picturesque gestures of the paintings on the walls are drawn by the layered bands of
silicone. The enclosing spaces, similarly to the frames of classic board paintings, function as boundaries:
they cut out the represented object (the human being) from the real world. These enclosing spaces also
serve as a medium that holds, albeit at the price of fixing the floating bodies, that is, stretching them in
these frames. The rusty steel structures of the spatial frames especially highlight the stretching wires, the
screws and rollers, those technical devices that contrast the reduced, black, abstract human forms, and
express the power of gravity on physical existence. The sight of these stretched beings necessarily evokes
the pictures of the iconographic tradition of Christs crucifixion.

The biomorph body-fragments are presented in tubs filled with water and in water-tables on stands: the
decaying forms of human organs and limbs protrude from an undulating, reflective surface. The concrete
and black plastic objects remind one of coffins, yet the edges of the box shapes seem to have eroded:
instead of angularity, one encounters the outlines of decomposing human bodies. The site-specific
installation enlarges and repeats the motifs of the spatial frame and the coffin. Yet, when the visitor enters
the enclosing box of the installation, one does not meet the hardness of wood (or any other firm building
material), but rather the squirming fibres of black silicone bands.