Since 1994 the Hungarian artist Levente Baranyai (*1966) is engaged with recording the topography of the world. In his monumental paintings he draws our attention to wasted landscapes where the outgrowth of civilisation and industrialisation have left their marks.

 

As a portraitist of the earth he unfolds the traces, wounds and testimonials of the destruction of our environment. At the same time the realistic paintings reveal a certain beauty and symmetry. One observes the earth from the bird perspective as it never appears in everyday life. Only recently the artist started utilizing "google map“ in order to select details of landscapes from satellite images for his paintings. His painterly style appears to be expressive, and the single motives are evolving only from a distant view at the paintings. Deliberately he breaks the rules of perspective and focuses on painting. Baranyai’s art refers to classic reliefs and 3-D worldmaps on the first sight; nevertheless due to his painterly style he takes a distance from photorealistic painting.

 

Levente Baranyai completed his studies at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1994. Since then he has taken part in numerous solo as well as group exhibitions worldwide and is considered as one of the most important artists in Hungarian postmodernism.

 

 

Levente Baranyai’s new series, Diving Planes focuses on the imagery of no longer used, already wasted airplanes, which were put the so called „airplane cemeteries". In his large-size oil canvases, just as in his previous series, he is monitoring Earth from an eagle-eye position; from enough distance to point out not only the visual but the social, the civilizational, and the philosophical relations.  This distant viewpoint is able to suggest such details and phenomenas, which are never visible from the inside but only appear when looked at from a great distance. His paintings work in the same technical way, as they fall apart into abstract shapes and paint textures when viewed too close, but from a proper distance, beautiful shapes and forms become clear, nature, as never seen comes to life.

 

Baranyai s richly textured works refer not only to classic reliefs but to 3D maps, yet do not want to be photorealistic at all. This series is a clear continuation of his earlier works, but now inserts a new object between the Earth and the observerving eye, and that is the old and already destructed airplanes. Man s primal desire to fly is realized by the first airplanes, and it is one of Baranyai s primal interest, and now this object of desire is realized by cold and distant blues while the colours of the ground is painted with the warmest browns.  The lined-up planes make beautiful, ordered marks on the canvases, sometimes reminding us to eastern carpet patterns, sometimes flying birds, but mostly to the never ending movement of life itself.

 

Levente Baranyai born in 1966. Graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1994. His works can be found in several important public and private collections.