OPENING: January 24, 2024, 6:00 p.m
Opening speech by Zsolt PETRÁNYI, art historian
The exhibition is on view until February 28, 2024.

Today is Lung Day. Let’s start with a deep breath, the rib cage rises, air flows in due to pressure difference and fills the available space, all the cavities, chimneys and pipes.The chest tightens… until it softly relaxes and blows out.
It may seem so that the things are just that simple, everything works just that easy, like breathing, of course, no doubt. A little polish every day, and the bodywork gonna shine perfectly, flexing like bronzed muscles. Making art is easy. Work becomes fun and fruitful, without hassle and any wasted energy. Take it easy, be water, my friend.
However, if anything gets in the way of the flow, it is unpleasant and irritating, breaking the routine, the even undulation of inhaling and exhaling, and something unidentified creeping onto the radar of the autopilot.

Something’s not right.

Graphite, coke, indigo, magnesium, and who knows what other kinds of dust are released into the air, which then creates fine layers of sediment in corners, pockets, bladders, and all kinds of inaccessible places.­­
Since layers of different quality and density are built on top of each other - depending on what we want to see - we bombard the chest with soft or hard rays until CT-bareness. To do this, we have to let go our defenses and become transparent to ourselves as well. This is the first step, and it’s really ain’t easy.

It’s like pull out divinations from our own guts, and everything is so hard to make out, both soft and vunerable, rigid and fragile. It’s not clear whick is right and whick is left, what’s ahead and what’s behind. We look intently the blurry sports, in wich we can easly see dangerous changes, scratches and damage, like the jammed images of a crash test.

We’d better take another deep breath. Water can flow, or it can crash. Looking into ourselves helps us gain strength and change our approach. In order to be able to work with it, we have to isolate the problem somewhat, so that we can look at it from a distance, but close enough to hit. We have to strike a pose, cllench our fists and shadow boxing a bit in froont of the mirror, you know, Boys With Attitude, keeping one eye on the target, and looking for Ronnie’s watchful gaze.

Right now, we need him. As a role model he’s not in the same weight class, but it works, he’s a flesh-and-blood metaphor. Ronnie Coleman is the king of bodybuilding, period.
Ronnie, the muscle-machine, the release valve of this big car tire swollen by internal air pressure, who’s simultaneously cool and hard as concrete type of guy, the meme and funny shouting man from YouTube, whose every word is giving a +10 strength buff – although he is now in wheelchair, but he still grins at us from the garage wall like the judging deity of Performance (LIGHT WEIGHT BABY!) and motivational guardian spirit, stiff idol still strong as a bull, almost pressing his face against the plexiglass, yells into our faces with fanatical fury, YEEAAAAAH BUDDY!

Bench press 252. kilos is a huge job, and until we get there, it’s even bigger and more than that, and it won’t get any less or easier after lots of training, failure and comeback, again and again. TO BE CONTINUED.

Three Boys Collaboration is a one-man show of seemingly different attitudes. But it’s not hte problem, it’s the solution to finding alternative routes around stressful and stuck things and cramps.

Text: Ádám Takács
Img: Szabolcs Lajos Varga

Ádám Széll (1995, Debrecen) graduated in 2019 from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, László László Révész's class, painting. Since 2015 he has been active on the Hungarian art scene, since then he has participated in several group exhibitions, and in 2018 he had a solo exhibition at MŰTŐ, and in 2022 at PUCCS Contemporary. He currently lives in Budapest and works at art quarter budapest.Adam prefers to work in several media, but his main focus is on image-making. Currently he create indigo and graphite drawings on paper.His works are mostly based on his own photographs, but he often collects raw material from images found on the internet or in printed catalogues. Than, he makes a study drawing of the chosen image and copies it onto a clean surface by indigo-paper. He layering other drawings on top of that using the same process. He selects the images drawn on top of each other on the basis of a whole specific content or a looser associative link.

Photo: Dávid Biró