„Uptown Workshop (Philadelphia)” by László Gyémánt is a realistic detail of a city, understandable by Paul Cézanne’s the idea about landscape: man is absent from it, but completely within the brain. Sense of leaving behind dominates the picture, incarnated in the dying workshop or the unowned car. These are the stock of the painting, which could be defined as the objective world of a social class, milieu, standard of living. However, Gyémánt’s unmoved, willfully void-profundity portrayal alienates from the underlying,these objects should refer to. They do not advert to a bigger context, do not become symbols of a bigger reality, do not lead to the people they belong to. What is there on „Uptown Workshop” by László Gyémánt, shows indeed what is absent. All this goes beyond the alienation of people from their objective world, and captures visually their irreversible fragmentation, in stony, inexorably precise style.

photo: Misi

written by: Zsófi Máté

Uptown Workshop, Philadelphia (50×70 cm, oil on canvas, 2009)