'Aper' by Martin Chramosta at Horizont Gallery, Budapest

Hermits are mountain people. They want communion with nature. While wandering around they look for „the other“ - they collect „the substance“. The organic melts into the inorganic. A temporary shelter, a recycled lay-by is built. There is no decoration in this place, only scarcity on the walls – a reflection of the landscape.
The Aper-state is an act of carrying, piling and clearing. The Aper-space is a tough one. The catalogue of substances first appears under the white veil after the frost and the thawing. Fence residues, wired promontories, prey, plunder, frozen cement pillows – mementos for the lack of otherness.
On the Wanderung in the outside Aper-space the glaciers get tired and bow, they become frail and turn into palms on the fences by the new-freezing-time. From the fences new gates arise. The hermit starts to redraw the shelter. In the outline of the wire, the mountains merge with the plains, they create new images: axes with the bird’s wings, palms with the tulips, name plates of the handcraft-tools with the wire-gingerbread-hearts.
The hermit's ceramic palms unite burned baroque reflections and weird folklore traditions. They are the gauntlet to overproduction. Reworking, re-welding the residues into neo-symbolisms. Aper is the Hungarian „clean room”, the decorated space of absence, where  the hermits give it up to be without snow, where with the dry lines and from their savings and with their gauntness they might build a home in the end.

— Kinga Tóth

(Kinga Tóth’s text-associations for Martin Chramosta’s exhibition Aper – with a special thank for the personal talk)

Note from the Artist

Aper is a rarely used german word from the alpine regions. It means snow free.
The exhibition Aper examines a hypothetical outdoors in the rooms of Horizont Gallery. In the presentation, found objects from public space engage with handcrafted applications. Ceramics and works made from scrap metal add symbolist layers to the environmenal statements and generate a visual narrative with ingredients from art history,  alpine and central european regionalisms, artisanal expressionism and superstition.

— Martin Chramosta