Uwe Goldenstein: Mind Out Of Time
The painterly medium is uniquely suited to establishing a state of serenity, standstill, and contemplation. Deenesh Ghyczy leads us into a world where habitual principals of thought and argument become meaningless. His figures stand beyond the cause-and-effect of everyday life; some are shown levitating, others in a state of complete inwardness. Streams of consciousness appear to be channeled and frozen in the recurrent motif of fragmented, disintegrating figures.
The figures portrayed by Ghyczy are surrounded by abstract surfaces and spaces. They blend into their surroundings, as if emerging and then sinking back into them. The dynamic juxtaposition of figurative motif and abstract embeddedness leads us to contemplate the integrality of human existence itself – here understood as a figure’s constantly shifting self-perception, its struggle to situate itself within a world-as-appearance. Yet it is precisely this perspective that seems all the more real, as it accounts for the subconscious filters and hence contingencies of human vision. Ghyczy has thus found a unique motif that aptly captures the oscillation between inner and outer perceptions and their incessant adjustment to each other in the subconscious realm. A single moment is seen as if through repeat-exposure and then combined (albeit symbolically) with what is hidden and subconscious.
Ghyczy shows bodies set into a coarse grid of horizontal and vertical lines that ties them into the basic system of a two-dimensional background. The crystalline facial expressions, at first giving an impression of openness towards us, are ultimately drawn back into the picture and subtly grounded. In this way, the expressions of multitudinous figures tend to resemble each other, sometimes verging on the melancholic. They are at once bound to their surroundings but mentally detached from it. Their apparent absentmindedness gives an impression of aloofness, as if concentrating on their inner emotional life.
But the simultaneity and repetition of different facial features also serves to depict an unusual mode of time. What appears to be a prismatic picture is in fact bundled back into a heightened awareness for the figure’s invisible inner life. Temporal sequences gradually blend into a suspension of individual moments; simultaneous perceptions while looking at just one single figure eventually culminate in a single emotional state. We are led to project an emotional unity beyond fragmentation, supported by a paralleling of perspectives. Melancholia, too, appears to spring from our subconscious projection and instills these paintings with a sense of peace and calm that defies disintegration. In the work of Deenesh Ghyczy, thought is therefore no longer bound by time. He detects the subconscious forces at work in perception and their interplay with intuition – different operations occurring in different time frames, yet simultaneously captured in a sort of time gel, capable of merging past, future and the acutely present. It is a view of the human figure that accounts not just for a single outer surface, but respects that perception is in equal measure directed inwards at a mind capable of transcending linear time.
from the catalogue "Mind Out Of Time", 2010