Through three different mediums: charcoal drawing, photography and music, Dezsö offers profoundly affecting, personal notes on a specific, geographically bounded area, namely the Sierra Nevada mountain range. This time he focuses on super-forest fires, or mega-fires, as they are referred to in the scientific literature, whose scale is so immense that they are beyond human comprehension.

 

The peculiarity of his perspective lies in its personal nature that reveals, precisely by working against subjectivity, against anthropocentrism, the incomprehensible dimensions of the destruction of non-human beings, of trees and birds.

 

The artist gives voice and form to the dimension that is, incidentally, not silent, to those beings whose sound and existence humankind perceives as mere (background) noise, as marginal, as non-existent compared to his own world.

 

Tamas Dezsö's coda is an appendix, a closure to the state of the world, factual and objective, personal and sensual at the same time, opening new paths in the artist's oeuvre, experimenting with new mediums, a concentrated work requiring great attention and slowing down. 

 

György Cséka, curator 

 

 

Artworks 

 

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023 

(archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 122x155cm) 

  

Transcript, 2023 

(drawing, alarm calls of hundred birds, charcoal remains of burnt giant sequoia trees on paper, triptych, 185 x 450 cm) 

  

The Triptich represents the alarm calls of one hundred bird species living in the forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the form of a sound wave. The drawing was created with fragments of charcoal collected on site from giant sequoia trees that have burned in recent years and lived up to 2-3,000 years. Between 2011 and 2020, 85% of the densely old-growth forests of the Sierra Nevada were destroyed or thinned drastically. In the last few years, 14.000 sequoia trees, including many thousands of years old, have been destroyed by fires. No data is available on the billions of other plants and animals that have perished. 

  

Áron Birtalan, György Cséka, Tamas Dezsö: 

Landscape, 2023 

(two-channel sound, electroacoustic composition for birdsongs and modular synthesizer, 10’05”) 

  

The composition is based on the songs and alarm calls of birds living in the forests of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.