Gábor KOÓS | Dark Matter
Dark Matter
Prints, frottages, print-based paintings – in Gábor Koós’s artistic practice, from the very beginning, imprints have been created with extraordinary meticulousness. These imprints examine, both in theory and in method, how we acquire experience and how we live with it, how memories emerge and are transformed, and also the process through which phenomena of the external world and the personal, internal realm are transformed into images.
In the exhibition titled Dark Matter, opening at the end of May, Koós's investigations enter a new dimension through the presentation of sculptures. His exploration of sculpture via 3D printing is at once a logical and organic continuation of his earlier imprint-based methods and a form of self-examination. The black sculptures (or photogrammetries) produced through more than 1,500 hours of printing, range from full-figure to fragmented, showing multiple phases simultaneously. These works reveal the shadows of the self, the inner reality, the forces operating deep within the personality, placing them into various situations and projecting into space the process of revealing, contemplating, accepting, and integrating the self – both his own and ours. In the Jungian sense, dark matter is the shadow – a part of the unconscious. These black sculptures, therefore, can function as surfaces of confrontation: rather than idealizing, they force us to face absence, deformation, rawness.
Beyond the psychological reading, though not independent from it, the title of the series opens up other deep and abstract layers as well. In cosmology, dark matter is invisible, yet it holds the structure of the universe together. Interpreted within this framework, the sculptures may also be seen as such hidden structures: materialized imprints of internal, psychic processes, emotions, or parts of identity. In these works, this inner force, misunderstood yet operative, becomes embodied – it guides us, even if we cannot see it.
At the same time, dark matter is also a raw material. The black sculptures are indeed made of dark matter — not only symbolically, but materially as well. Their black, matte surfaces do not reflect light but absorb it. This stands in contrast to the ‘reflective’ ideal of classical sculpture. These sculptures thus become anti-icons, anti-memories: not representations of something, but presences of absence, shadow, and vacuum. This simultaneously reflects on the missing parts of the sculptures themselves, which leads to questions of existence and absence – matter and antimatter. The black form appears as mass, but often the empty space, the void, the negative form is just as significant – in these sculptures, the missing parts are the forms of absence. Dark matter can thus be the dialectic of presence and absence – something that is there, and yet cannot be grasped.
