The multi-layered photographs and artefacts created by Gábor Gerhes,
born in Budapest in 1962, are showcased here at his latest solo exhibition.
Every item represents the artist’s signature dark, ironic and enigmatic style,
while, as in previous decades, Gerhes weaves a loosely-knit meta-narrative
throughout. The title of the exhibition has several levels, the notion of the
black mirror one of the central allegories of today’s screen-centric existence,
as recent art theory suggests. Reality is no longer separable from digital
image culture, transmitted via smartphones and portable devices, even though
the message is ever more opaque. Gerhes is also to the black mirror used in 18th-century
English landscape painting. The black concave mirror changed the tonality of natural
colours, making the experience of nature more painterly and picturesque,
according to the artistic standards of the time. That particular black mirror
was named after the French painter Claude Lorrain and is also called Claude
Glass or Lorrain Glass. This deeper notion of the black mirror explains the use
of images from nature and the allusions to antique and classical art, together
with the contemporary re-examination of the role of beauty and the sublime.
