Brigitta Kocsis - Tech Boys · Dr. Michael Boyce

and photographed young information technology workers clustering together. The young technicians spoke different languages and came from diverse cultural backgrounds: Europeans, Middle Eastern, Africans and South Asians. The underlying concept of Kocsis’ exhibition is the portrayal of culturally disconnected persons and their desire to fit in our multicultural society.

The human condition is still the prevalent context of Kocsis’ new body of paintings with an equally strong undertone of dystopia. Kocsis’ push against what was comfortable in previous work led her to develop the body of works with silent narratives unfolding for the most part in dense environments. A slight departure from the previous works is the use of colour influenced by Japanese animations. In the current works the colours are keyed up to an almost neon-like appearance, which at once reference Pop culture, but also the artificiality of the human experience. Kocsis’ compositions are based on photographs which she uses for the initial stages, but once the compositions are more or less established, the further progress is then guided by the painting process.

In conclusion, the exhibition #techboyz is a visual investigation into the psychological aspects of the susceptible segment of young adult male workers trying to integrate into society. Kocsis’ paintings capture the psychological aspects of human existence and the human condition in a portrayal of vulnerability of male figures which are often in tight groupings and yet distanced from each other. The environments that the figures occupy are quite ambiguous and lack references to a concrete indoor or outdoor setting. They are intense and almost oppressive in their mass and the feeling of heaviness is compounded by intense artificial colours. Despite Kocsis’ emphasis on depictions of the human condition, the figuration is a theme of the exhibition. In contrast with the accurate modeling of human forms in her previous work, Kocsis’ figures in this exhibition are often slightly distorted and this fact contributes to the psychological tension between the viewer and the subject matter.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery

BRIGITTA KOCSIS - TECH BOYS

My work focuses on investigating the shifting concepts of the human body and its environment. — Brigitta Kocsis1

The soft-faced tech boys, on a break, hanging out together, in repose. Getting air. Staring into space. A distance, out further than the surface limit of the screen that commands so much of their attention.

Where is the surface limit of these paintings? The flatter, more abstract they are, the more complex and compelling is the space in them.

Those faces! Radiant. All delicate, sublime.

These paintings are beautiful. Fantastic dreaming spaces. They draw you in, which is remarkable because their graphic sensibility frames the view of the flatness of the surface you are moving into. The layout, a wild but smooth, seductive. It’s like it’s saying, remember that this is an image, it’s a painting, it’s designed, and yet, look, for all of that, it enchants you in and it makes you dream that it is real. You are in with them.

These are young men — designers, compositors, painters, technicians — beautiful and stylish, resting like Olympic athletes of the creative mind. Their dreamy looks, express longing, perhaps worry or anxiety. We are pulled towards them and towards perceiving, viewing them, and the painter of them, Brigitta, as rendering each other. Representing them as creators, and art as a question, a relationship to technology, technique, to sort out.

The cool tech boys. What is the strength of them, in them? Masters of technology technique. The conventions. The traditions. The language. Their great effort. Their mad skills. Artistry and craft and commerce. A way of life. A way to make a living. They are earning it. Their break. Working long dedicated hours. Individual and group participation, contribution. The team and the auteur. The paintings of them are them.

These paintings are making views of space, environments, and the way that bodies are in them, are a part of them, forming, shaping them, with feeling, by how they’re being in them. And these painting also are views of making views, viewing a commanding vista.

Soft colours blend in with demarcating graphic outlines. Like, as if to trick your eye, even as it shows you how it’s done. Graphic design elements overlay surreal landscapes, which dissolve and shift horizons in your view. Expressionistic colours and subject renderings. The horizon of experience.

The tech boys, looking at it, at each other, getting into it, into paying their attention to it, something someone somewhere different, off screen. Their looks are making it, while being made by it. Remade by it. The space, the place of them.

They are the environment. Moving. And emotional. Them and the paintings.

Their glances looking out from their preoccupations, looking vulnerable and dressed in a way like casual muted extroversion. She shows them. Their faces are illuminated by her sight of them.

What are they thinking? What are they dreaming of? What’s beyond the tasks at hand? The creation of a view. The creation of one’s self. Feminine and masculine. A dance of mutable signs. Playing.

Colours, shades of personality expression. Pale yellow. Sky blue. Green. Gold. Brown. Blonde. Light pigment texture. Pink skin, brown skin, pale white skin. Colours blend borders, boundaries made porous.

Boys diverse personality and coloured aspects. Clothing tight and loose. Lithe, soft curves, half-naked bodies. Hair of different lengths. Costumes. Black silver mesh. The young lions waiting to go back and kill it. Shy introverts. Hidden faces glowing through a hooded darkness. The shroud of absorbed scrutiny. What is coming at them? Who is looking at them?

They’re let out, like as if they were contained. And they were. In, ostensibly, a studio, but also, an assembly line. Outside, they see the world again, perhaps like a painter.

She is painting them. What draws her to them?

Comrades sitting standing squatting. Lightly touching, holding on, familiarity. The gang, the team, the tribe. Being like as if they’re waiting.

Can you t see into their mystery? Their secret longings, worries, and fatigue. Their need to look without command of where to look, the command to make the view, the scene. The joy of simply being out in it, a part of it, being made by it. To be looked at, for a change.

Who is looking, anyway, at whom? And where exactly are they?

She is asking you to see the mystery of what is coming through to you. Because of her expression, her style, her technique.

She is animating them in stillness. You can see them moving. Their expression. Her expression.