Dániel Bernáth’s works embody a fusion of simple, pure abstraction and personal narrative. His works are considered objects, rather than paintings. They are pure lines and contrasting colours on shaped wooden panels, extended into space and enhanced by canvas and wood overlays. The different genres are in constant dialogue and unity with each other in his art.
Although, from the perspective of the history of painting, his art is associated with the post-painting abstraction movements of colorfield and hard edge, from a content point of view it tends to follow a separate path. It is not just a juxtaposition of pure geometric forms and bright colours with a definite contour, impersonal and devoid of emotion.
The interplay of Bernáth’s forms and colours gives his paintings a narrative meaning. His canvases are rather forms of natural shapes deconstructed into geometric symbols, in which plant motifs and animal details can be recognised, which gradually became more recognisable and concrete in his art. Bernáth’s Personal Pangaea series explore man’s place in nature from a personal perspective. In his self-identified art, he takes his own position as a starting point: his approach idealises a direct and harmonious relationship with nature, rural life, the natural and the nature. He finds his inspiration in a simpler environment, far from urban life, in traditional activities. Gardening and the use of plants are central to his way of life. He is an amateur botanist and lepidopterist, who sees plants as sculptures, gardens as sculpture parks, butterflies with geometric and organic patterns as kinetic artworks of nature.
Even early in his career, he chose an unusual form for his paintings. The crooked edges of the paintings harked back to the origins of the support, the wood, in homage to its original form and nature. Already in these early works, he moved out of the schematic world of the square format historically assigned to the image, but in his latest series, Personal Pangaea, he completely eliminated the seemingly superfluous parts of the image, opening a radically new chapter in his art. Extending the concept of the moulded canvas, he introduced relief into his art. His paintings underwent a complete metamorphosis. His sculptures, endowed with sculptural qualities, became the strange plants of Stanislav Lem’s planet Eden: tangled webs of spider-like tendrils, giant flower clusters in surreal colours.
The natural references in the series are reinforced by the appearance of the mask motif. In ancient societies, there were countless types and functions of masks, used for rituals, ceremonies, or to represent characters in theatrical plays, or to re-enact mythological events. The mask is a tool to change and conceal identity. Mimicry, which also plays an important role in the animal world. Butterflies, so important to Bernáth, use it on their wings: they use patterns that mimic the eyes of predators in an attempt to ward off them. The symmetrical pattern of the wings is echoed in the symmetry of the three large panels (Personal Pangaea I., II., III.). The interlacing bands, curves and circles of bright colours in the compositions evoke a garden reduced to signs, Bernáth’s personal ancestral land, a protected and sacred space set against the fearsome human world. “The garden is our own world, a world created and controlled by us. An ordered and harmonious universe, in contrast to the disordered and disharmonious world outside” (In.: Hankiss Elemér, Félelmek és szimbólumok, Osiris Kiadó 2006,
Budapest, pp.: 142.)
Zita SÁRVÁRI
