“The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life.”
Julia Kristeva, „Powers of Horror”
The project “ABlackJECTION” should be deciphered by means of Julia Kristeva’s philosophical interpretative key. Indeed, in this view, the abjection is that which is always already inside of us. Yet, it’s also always excluded - it’s that which we forever aim to chase away. According to Julia Kristeva’s theory, “the abjection” dwells in a limbo, in the medial space between “object” and “subject”. It represents the forbidden elements of the self. Being placed outside the symbolic order, it finds itself in a perpetual confrontation with the traumas of immediate experience.
Initially rooted in the idea of the spirit/soul’s degradation, of its [the soul’s] malignancy and indignity, the notion/concept of “abjection” was to be been further investigated by post-structuralist theory, and to be seen as that which disrupts conventional role-plays. Kristeva considered “the abject” to be the one disrupting factor of the symbolic premises which ground the social order.
Berszan’s works evade any circumscription by symbolic meaning. They reach that place where, as Kristeva put it so well, “meaning collapses”. They bear witness of a place that precedes the very beginnings of space, of the initial point that generated everything]. Berszan’s drawings and paintings depict the primordial upheaval which generated through a violent breakage both matter and life. That would be the moment when both consciousness and the unconscious are yet to be born, when the ideas of “human” and “animal” are yet to arise, when “self” and “other” are yet to be distinguished [one from the other]. Berszan portrays the very moment when the violent split between “the self” and “the other” occurs, bringing forth, into significance, the concept of “alterity”. Within this context intervenes the “abject”, seen, as Kristeva puts it, as a “precondition to narcissism”. We are confronted with the perturbation of the system, with a defiance to order, with a violation of the limits that makes us suddenly aware of “the frailty of human existence” Throughout his works, Berszan’s struggle with materiality conveys simultaneously the idea of beginnings and of end, of [the ultimate exhaustion through] death. The organicity of the materials that Berszan uses conveys an eerie feeling, a sense of the mystery that accompanies the exploration of the tumultuous primordial scene, of that first moment of raising to consciousness, to the reality of life - and of repudiating death. It conveys the very struggle of the human being against his own dissolution.
In the black depths of materiality, Zsolt Berszan inserts protuberances and deformed volumes that invoke the non-finitude of a beginning - or of an end.
Curator: Diana Dochia