Gábor Máté is a peculiar man in many ways. For example, he knows almost everything one must know about digital photography but he still uses film, recently taking pictures mostly with a 4x5 inch camera, on color negatives. Yes, there are these oddballs, you could say. Swaggering with the analog, but then still submitting themselves to the digital eventually. Well, not him. Gábor Máté likes the darkroom. He likes the smell of chemicals. He develops his films and plates himself, he makes his own meter-sized enlargements, in the process which he has to face problems that not even a fraction of his generation knows about. How to mix, develop, dodge, burn, remove dust and, if the end product is still not perfect, to see how far manual retouching with a magnifier can go... He fully utilizes the narrow focal range limits the large format allows for, and he can produce tone where others would not even think to do that. There are only a few people whose hair turns gray over such matters... Our age and the world of photography are not headed this way. Máté still knows the possibly only place in Budapest where there is a developer for meter-sized enlargements, the intricate routes to get supplies, and he is ready to pay the considerable amount of money all these cost. He is also peculiar because in this world characterized by a loss of values, he is delighted by a ready photograph like a child, and he is honestly bothered by the smallest mistake or imperfection. He would tear up a beautiful meter-sized enlargement only because there is a hardly conceivable blur or some other – for the audience indiscernible – ugliness: something I have only seen with exceptional photographers of one, or rather, two generations before.

Gábor Máté is a peculiar man. Because he doesn’t just take photographs of whatever comes his way but mostly of two junctions or turning points of human life, in which he is interested as a photographer. Marriage and divorce. The first, which (who knows why) almost always takes place publicly, in front of many people, and in an air of celebration, ceremony and hocus-pocus, is photographed by many. Many, in many ways, while of course none of them does it like Máté. But we are passed that. In 2014 he did his DLA work for Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in the PontON Gallery: the exhibition titled Philémón’s Dream – The Idea of Eternal Marriage, and we went to see it. We liked it, it was interesting, Máté earned his doctorate. Nevertheless, who else but Máté would think to also capture divorce – this not less emotionally explosive and not less important act? I have told you he was a peculiar man.

The title of the exhibition does not come out of the blue either. The photographer suggested after we’d already met several times that the project in progress should be titled “Der schwer gefasste entschluss” (The resolution reached with difficulty), which is the title of Beethoven’s last string quartet. It sets the sentences “Es muss sein! Muss es sein?” (It must be! Must it be?) to music. Milan Kundera writes extensively about this in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which the curator quickly reread for this reason after six years, for which he is really grateful to Máté.

He carries over the formal and compositional elements invented and implemented in Philémón’s Dream, sometimes pushing them to the limits of the absurd. The use of mixed light, the overlay of blue or turquoise hue puts a distance between his images and real events and persons while enabling us to make the necessary abstractions. Moreover, he didn’t only set up these situations in an extremely sensitive psychological state, not offending or hurting either of the divorcing parties, but he also recorded the sentences they used to comment on Der schwer gefasste entschluss. A selection of these recorded sentences makes up the texts used for his image pairs and triptychs. Thus, the images presented here have become a strange mixture of staging and lyrical documentation, the specific and the general, the real place and situation and the vision of the photographer. Can you recall how I started out? Gábor Máté is a peculiar man. He is indeed.

Karoly Kincses

curator