Looking at Mark Fridvalszki’s work, one cannot ignore his motifs’ well-established cultural-technological background – namely that his post-digital collages draw their inspiration mainly from industrial and military aesthetics. Logos, weapons, aviation designs and surfaces make up his iconography. Gauntness in this context means exploited atrophy, the dominant design of a post-apocalyptic world where the disassembly to internal framework, the fetishizing of the inorganicness of metal is given purpose in a panoramic critique of civilization. The emphatic presence of grey(ness) also does not only stem from some pure aestheticity, but embodies the estranged grayscale of humanity’s technological twilight – one in which alien visitors (the Grey Ones) and the melancholy of the geological mentality, the visions of ruins and the desert fuse.
In Fridvalszki’s most recent works he creates abstract geometries and ‘immaterial’ spaces that investigate the dramatic tensions between ruin-like atmospheres and a sentient materialism. An important feature of the artist’s toolbar is an experimental approach towards different media: he mingles collages, wallpaper environments, found and manufactured objects, digital printing as well as other printing techniques into room filling installations. He remains strongly influenced by appropriation, attitudes of romanticism as well as contemporary theories of materialism.
