Architectural Matters

Words: Selin Ciftci

Jenő Barcsay, White Lights, 1944

What enables an image to enter into dialogue with architecture? Is it the gravitational allure of architecture itself, like a black hole absorbing everything into its orbit, or is it that the image, since its very inception, has yearned for visibility and representation and has finally found a sufficiently expansive and hospitable stage upon which to realize this desire?

Street of Szentendre (1937), White Lights (1944), Sunshine (1945), Structure (1966), Rhythm of Space (1973)…

These are the titles of a few works included in Perfect Balance, the retrospective exhibition organized in Budapest on the occasion of Hungarian painter Jenő Barcsay’s 125th anniversary, which continues until the end of September. It should be noted right away that the atmosphere of war is so strongly felt in the artist’s early figurative works that Street of Szentendre (1937), corresponding to the pre-war years, feels gloomy and cold, whereas in White Lights (1944) and Sunshine (1945), painted in the final moments of the war, light becomes visible only through contrast. According to the curatorial team from the University of Fine Arts, Barcsay’s practice undergoes such a radical break after the war that it almost abandons his followers, shifting from figuration to geometric abstraction. By the 1950s, however, his anatomical drawings, still referenced in medical literature today and occupying an entire gallery on their own, seem to express a smoother transition within this break. It is quite possible to follow this trajectory presented by the curators throughout the exhibition, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that what is underlined here is not a “break” but an “arrival.” From the pessimistic atmosphere of Street of Szentendre, which still resonates today, to the safe landing in Rhythm of Space, there is one element that stitches the works together, dominates the exhibition, and ensures continuity: Architecture.

The architectural presence in Barcsay’s works goes beyond the lines appearing on his canvas, the structures of the bodies he sketched, or the rhythmically advancing abstract geometries; it succeeds in evoking the existence of a reimagined spatial conception. Each work, by testing volume, structure, rhythm, and light, the very nature of architecture, within the pictorial plane, builds upon the previous one; in doing so, the artist’s mental conception of space acquires seamless continuity. For this very reason, the exhibition can be framed not only within the discipline and history of visual arts but also within the realm of architectural thought.

The tension between architecture as a tangible spatial condition and as a desire to serve as an artistic medium is so strong that, at this point, one might say architecture’s greedy black hole, claiming ownership across ecosystems of knowledge from politics to art history, sociology to anthropology, also appropriates the image’s struggle for visibility, pulling it into its gravitational field. While architecture places the image into its orbit and entrusts its own representation to the image, it simultaneously grants the image a broad space of freedom.

Jenő Barcsay, Rtyhm of Space, 1973

Looking back, architecture has evolved into a multi-medium ecosystem of representation since the days it placed drawing at its center. It was through Prof. Ferhan Yürekli’s generously interdisciplinary studios, departing from the German school tradition at the university, and through Architectural Matters, which lends this essay its title, that I first encountered this world. The representational universe enriched by Superstudio’s drawings in the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark’s performances, and later Woods’ drawings and collages, today extends into writing, installations in gallery spaces, renderings, and video art. In scenarios where we now integrate AI technology capable of producing hundreds of images in seconds, the architect shifts from the position of “drawer” to that of “editor,” becoming the one who selects and compiles. Choosing the meaningful among AI-generated architectural representations, establishing context, and discussing its ethical and political dimensions become the architect’s responsibility. What keeps the plumb line steady here is the preservation of representation’s role as a space for thought. Just as in paper architecture, crowned with the political context of ’68, representation in AI architecture must also safeguard its service to architecture’s intellectual universe.

When this intellectual universe is safeguarded, architectural representation is able to span from the conservatism of drawing to the exuberance of AI, reflecting the breaks of its time as forms of flexibility, and sustaining a continuity capable of speaking a shared language. Barcsay’s works, too, call to one another like links in such a chain of continuity. Indeed, what bridges Barcsay’s canvas and today’s digital screen is the intellectual allure of architecture, an allure that liberates, endures, and continually reinvents itself. It is along this trajectory that architectural representation is constructed, remaining unconcerned with materialization. Viewed in this light, the distance between Barcsay’s canvas and today’s AI interface does not seem so vast; architecture’s gravitational pull situates both within the same orbit and makes them part of Architectural Matters.