Balázs Lobot’s exhibition, Studio Basic, functions as a metaphorical studio: not as a concrete workspace, but as a conceptual and sensory space where the different stages of the creative process converge. The works presented here can be interpreted as sketches, as intermediate states: snapshots that reveal the process of searching, experimenting, and capturing possibilities. Thus, the “studio” is an open state: a space where the endpoint is unknown. Opening speech by art historian János Schneller.
Let’s start, perhaps, at the beginning with the title Studio Basic. BASIC is one of the first computer programming languages, which has since spawned numerous dialects and served as the foundation for programming the Commodore 64. The games written for the Commodore 64, as we shall see later, play an important role in Lobot’s motif world. The title could thus even refer to a programmer’s studio, yet we perhaps get closer to an interpretation if we replace the concept of "studio" with the word "atelier." For the installative exhibition evokes the artist’s studio, thereby inviting the visitor into an intimate situation.
It would be easy to label the visual world of Balázs Lobot’s images by simply stating that his perspective is naïve, as simple and honest as a child’s drawing, or to categorize them as art brut, while adding that the influences of street art can also be found in his work. Naïve, because it is restricted to only a few pure colors; naïve, because he is not interested in the most fundamental technical or optical tricks of painting used to create illusion; child-like, because he doodles, erases, simplifies, and hatches, populating and staining the surface and revealing only what is essential to him. Because of his powerful, honest, and seemingly devoid of all self-consciousness compositions, they could even belong to the art brut category. His poster-like, uniform, large surfaces, along with the act of leaving traces, his characterful formation of shapes, and his focus-grabbing style bring his work closer to street art. However, with all these categories, we say very little about the truly personal traits and mysterious layers of his art.
Lobot’s exhibition last summer at the Resident Art gallery featured mainly large-scale canvas paintings that occupied the exhibition space in such a way that the works forced a continuous dialogue with each other, thereby setting the visitor in motion as well. The recurring motifs, the ambiguity of the mysterious titles, and the countless alternative paths of deciphering and interpretation built a labyrinth in which it was pleasant to wander, because in the intricate system of references, the labyrinth had not just one, but multiple exits and entrances. Wandering in a labyrinth is never a negative image, as, like all archetypal images, it is an ancient symbol of knowing ourselves and the truth.
And since we are talking about a labyrinth, let me say a word about the motifs that appear on the paintings, objects, or graphics. Lobot builds his paintings from topoi of the collective memory. From motifs that feel familiar at first glance, but are mostly difficult to identify: we do not know exactly where or when we first saw them; in fact, we are not even sure if we have ever seen them at all, or if archetypes of collective visual memory are somehow reflecting back from them. Agamemnon’s famous golden mask, the Discobolus (discus thrower), the prehistoric dolmens of Puglia, the shape of a Greek letter, or a motif from the extremely simplified visual world of Commodore 64 games (a shattered windshield, a lightning bolt) return, but shapes turned into symbols of experiences such as the spice mounds of Moroccan markets, a volcano, or the yellow, round sun symbol also appear. The different layers of history on the images—like the strata of an excavation—are organized into a single composition.
Lobot simplifies his motifs into forms that are elevated to symbols, then builds his pictures using visual solutions known from Commodore 64 games and following the flatness of Egyptian painting. The layering of pure colors and flat shapes creates a spectacle that can be interpreted simultaneously as an abstract, sometimes geometric system of forms, and at other times as a figurative composition whose symbols could even be read as a narrative painting—if they didn’t constantly slip away from clear identifiability and systematization. But these works hide again and again in the secret corridors of the labyrinth.
Lobot’s images are fragmented, often evoking a sense of incompleteness. They are a bit like archaeological finds whose identification is not always simple. Or like overlapping layers of wall paintings that are always incomplete, yet complement each other. It is as if, in an imagined future, we were trying to establish a unified narrative about the past that the available data and finds do not allow, since they were not even inherited from the same past. This interpretation is reinforced by those objects that, as if abandoning the flatness of the paintings, have come to life and stepped into the third dimension, making them even harder to interpret.
What remains, therefore, is the sensory spectacle, the joy of familiarity and recognition, the harmony of the compositions, and that sense of freedom which radiates the playfulness of aimlessness most of all. In the space of Studio Basic, we can walk with this lightness of aimlessness through Lobot’s studio-labyrinth that dissolves time, space, and interpretation – without wanting to find our way out.
Balázs Lobot’s exhibition Studio Basic is on view until May 29, 2026.
The clothing items and screen prints created as part of the collaboration are available at this link.
