In Gergő Juhász’s pictures, we can recognize Greta Thunberg’s face on the wall, multiplied in several variations. When we see Greta Thunberg’s face in the daily news - as we can see her almost every day – after reading the headline we just scroll on or click on another piece of news. Here and now, we cannot avoid walking past the portraits instead of scrolling and clicking, which is more time in itself than what we spend reading an article about climate change, and we are trying to discover the differences. There is nothing more important than recognizing the differences – either in art or in life itself. If we look at it from the proper view, life consists of repetitions, variations, and tiny shifts, and each sign or each difference might be of special significance. If I stick a banana on the wall at home, my family will find it a bit strange and that’s all but if a famous artist, Maurizio Cattelan does the same in public at an art fair, millions of people will start thinking about it. Though the banana, the glue, and the wall are the same, the context is not. If a world-famous artist known for his thought-provoking works sticks a banana, it triggers further thoughts. If I make a joke on Instagram, I might collect a few likes at least. (Though this difference is not tiny at all.) In Gergő Juhász’s bigger picture there is a TV screen. It looks as if time has stopped, and the picture has got frozen. In the frame, there are Greta Thunberg’s face and sentences. A girl, whom we have probably never met in person. This girl, with all her important and thought-provoking sentences, only exists on TV. On second thought, a lot of people think that climate change only exists on TV. On the screen, everything moves on at the speed of light – on the painting they stop. A painting stops not only the spectator but also the picture and the words. Although it does not stop the climate change, it can make us think about the real content of pictures and words, and the connection between nature and technology with the help of a few colors and brush strokes.
Detail from József Mélyi’s speech at the opening of the exhibition named Frame Rate, 31.01. 2020.
The project was realized during the so-called Barcsay Day organized yearly at Barcsay Jenő Elementary School in Szentendre. The event was in the mobile gallery set up inside the school lounge. I designed both the subject and the outlook of the project to match this environment. The pictures were placed on the wall in the eye level of an average height pupil. I worked with the size and techniques that are well-known and available for pupils. Before the exhibition, I surveyed how well the pupils know the activity of the influencers of today. According to the results, most of them know mainly Hungarian opinion formers.
Workshop
On Barcsay Day, volunteering artists come to the school on a school day to keep various thematic workshops for the pupils. In my workshop, I showed some videos of young and socially responsible influencers – among them Greta Thunberg – and suggested to the 13–14-year-old pupils that they analyze them. During the group work, the pupils had to deal with issues of technique and content in connection with the videos. After analyzing the videos, the groups chose a medium and created online content of their own (on some social issues).
2020