Istvan Prem | The Work
Statement
PRÉM has a consciously chosen diversity in his art, an approach that is rather unusual in times when “specificity” is the trend. As he says: “My work has four main directions, like the four main geographic directions in navigation, which seem to point to opposite worlds, but in reality they invisibly connect together. Therefore this diversity is a result based on an understanding that things are connected”. It also comes from the fascination towards the renaissance artists who tried to master several different areas of life, he thinks that he inherited from their attitudes.
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From an early age, PRÉM was already fascinated by the two big questions of existence: “I remember reading a children's book about the Big Bang, the solar system and in general: how reality operates, where are the boundaries of the physical existence and our reality. And later my interest broadened with investigating the human participation and consciousness in this universal game”.
These two interests, the two big questions of existence – the nature of reality and the human condition within became the two axis of PRÉM's artistic practice, hence the diversity, and his current main focus falls on the exploration of the second area, the human condition.
The “Suitcase” series are portraits of an unusual kind. Here, people are portrayed through their material collections, through the content of their drawers: PRÉM calls these drawers the “heavy suitcases for a life long travel.” Faces, personal histories are outlined by mere materiality here. The beautiful thing about drawer-suitcases that they are not holiday suitcases – they are not carefully composed packages with 15Kg restriction – but they are magical places, black-holes where things tend to randomly appear in order to disappear forever. They are the places to hide, to forget, to delay.
On the other hand, the “Torn-apart” series investigates our intangible, physiological distortions. PRÉM believes that everyone has a perfect, pure nature, yet often we all appear as distorted creatures – far from purity. What makes us become like that? In this series, he interviews people on the topic and then creates perfect portraits (many of them made by using digital drawing technology that allows the artist to create this “idealistic, virtual” perfection) and then violently creases, distorts the portraits.