Dénes Farkas is a post-conceptualist photographic artist working and living in Tallinn. Since the second half of 2000 the main line running through his work has been the goal to reduce the social structure under scrutiny to a possibly laconic model of representation uniting the photograph and the title of the picture. In his conceptual photographic series of recent years the artist has dealt with areas ranging from the possibility of democracy (“Vox Populi, Vox Dei”) and discipline and punishment (“Liberal Solution”) to the deadlock in the theory following Postmodernism (“Post Discursum”). Farkas photographs miniature paper models of chairs, tables, sofas and other man-made objects while maintaining a consistent lighting and colour scheme. He crafts the tiny paper models himself and creates a spatial mise-en-scène, but this is only the beginning – even the subsequent processes of photographing and naming the scene and writing a preface to the work do not bring it to a conclusion. There is no verbalized solution, only a suggestion that all of this is only a part of some larger, more insidious development that seeks to undermine the existing hegemony. However, certain base questions around which he has modelled his post-minimalist model world exist in a more concrete way. Farkas admits that he has observed the so-to-speak human made social structures from the point of view of the question “what is the sense of the game”. Nevertheless, he is obviously not interested in the question of “who wins” as most agents seem to be in the inherent position of losers in the system observed by the artist.
Andreas Trossek
