Aron Barath
Untitled Works
Aron Barath—born in 1980 in Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia, and resides and works in Budapest, Hungary—is best known for his abstract acrylic paintings as a chromatic experience, marked by color and the seductive qualities of paint as a substance. The Hungarian painter follows a strict methodology in his creative process, creating a technical frame in which he can set himself free. The layered build- up and the selected colors are reasoned. The color dictates the gesture of the artist, freeing itself from contemporary visual culture or communicational trends. What is left is pure, genuine, and truthful—light, substance, and color. His creative process is marked by a burst of energy, carried by the substance of paint and the intensity of color, capturing this energy and transmitting it to the viewer. Balancing between a structured methodology when it comes to layering the paint and the visible spontaneity of his gestures, the artist communicates his thoughts and feelings without compromise.
Portrait of Aron Barath in his studio in Budapest, Hungary. Photo courtesy the artist.
In his smaller works, the artist opts to use two colors, most often opposing each other on the color wheel, remotely or entirely. The first color is used for the flat background. The second, to create an expressive, gestural foreground, juxtaposing two contrasting colors in two contrasting manners. Flat versus textured, calculated versus expressive, color one versus color two. Where the foreground is transparent or absent, the background color is dominant. Where the foreground is thick or impasto, the foreground color is dominant. However, due to their (almost) diametrical relation on the color wheel, where the opacity versus transparency is equal, the colors are almost canceled, resulting in a grey or white obtained using the most vibrant and often fluorescent colors—a metaphor found in color theory for two colliding worlds with an almost divine outcome.
For his larger compositions, the artist implements a trio of colors. In this archetypical structure, the selected colors are triametrically opposed, in balance and in contrast on the color wheel. The background is a vertical gradient of two colors, painted flat, or with a sprayed grain creating a vibrant transition, followed by his characteristic gestural foreground—a pure and painterly allegory for the subtle juxtaposition of controlled Apollonian, and exuberant Dionysian forces.
Since the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the meteoric rise of Barath has become undeniable. He has had exhibitions at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, the United States of America; Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin, Hamburg, and Baden, Germany; CAI Gallery in Kortrijk, Belgium; Suppan Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria; The Office Gallery in Miami, the United States of America; the Promocyjna Gallery in Warsaw, Poland; the Kubik Art Space in Budapest, Hungary; and the Mucsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest, Hungary—to name just a few.
