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Mankind has always been fascinated bydarkness. In the beginning, as the Biblesays, “darkness covered the face of thedeep” and since then looking into theabyss has been part of human history.We associate the unknown withdarkness and surely darkness willaccompany our end. Why do we lovedark end of the world visions? Why isshivering with fear so appealing to ourfantasies? Why do we always imagine

the worst possible scenario?The answers to these questions

might be very different if the show wasin North America. In Europe,generations of people have sufferedgreatly and struggled just to survive.Memories fill their minds and bodies asmuch as blood and bones do. The fallof communism didn’t bring the positivechanges Europeans expected – andeven brought the opposite for Central

and Eastern Europe. Materialismreplaced morality and little hope wasleft for the individual. It is not surprisingthat the work in this show is dark anddepressing.

The word Nightfall, the title of theMODEM show, suggests threateningshadows, foreboding, and anxietyabout the end of an era and anuncertain future. The original idea camefrom Isaac Asimov’s 1941 science fictionshort story of the same name about thecoming of darkness to a planetordinarily illuminated at all times on allsides. As the catalog’s foreword states,quoting William Orville Douglas, “Asnightfall does not come at once, neitherdoes oppression. In both instances,there’s a twilight where everythingremains seemingly unchanged, and it isin such twilight that we must be awareof change in the air, however slight, lestwe become unwitting victims of thedarkness.”

Most of the exhibiting artists wereborn during the Cold War, so beingalert to lurking political, ideological oreven physical danger is second natureto them. The fall of the Berlin Wall in1989 and the euphoric feelings offreedom that followed made the 1990’sa big, happy party in Europe. Shadowsof social and intellectual disillusionmentstarted to creep in by the end of thedecade and the new millenniumbrought 9/11, wars against terrorismand natural catastrophes like tsunamisand famines. The party was over and a“New Dark Age” arrived bringingdepression and economic instability tothe European Union.

MODEM organized this veryimpressive and expensive show – workscame from all over the globe entailingsky-high costs for insurance andshipping – in order to put Hungary onthe map of the contemporary art world.The show fulfilled all artistic expecta-tions and became one of the mostexciting and complex exhibitions at thispoint in 2013.

British curator Jane Neal groupedthe paintings around five themes:Broken Landscape and Twisted Beauty;

When Darkness Falls“Nightfall/Alkony: New Tendencies in Figurative Painting”at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, Czeck Republic and MODEM,Debrecen, Hungary

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

Karin Mamma Andresson, Night Guest, 2011, oil on panel, 110 x 110 cm. © The George Economou Collection

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Portraiture; Struggle for Identity and theHidden; Under Cover of Darkness;Painting and Cinema and Home but notSafe. Sometimes it is almost impossibleto distinguish between the categoriessince portrait, identity, and home areoften overlapping themes and acinematic approach can accompany anystyle.

Swedish artist Karin MammaAndersson’s paintings are good

examples of work covering more thanone theme. In Night Guest (2011) anelectric storm is brewing with monster-shaped clouds looming over afarmhouse and a small group of people.Will they be able to outrun the storm?It seems that they not even trying asthey are deeply involved in their talk.Maybe they don’t even recognize theapproaching danger. Andersson createstension by making the foreground look

“normal,” an ordinary farmhouse,people walking toward it, nothingspecial. The sky seems to be a differentworld, not connected to the people,and the light coming from it is heavywith foreboding. The confrontation ofthe dark blues of the sky and theyellows of the ground is nerve-racking.Neither the landscape nor the house issafe. Andersson’s other paintings in theshow focus on home but are no less

Daniel Pitin, Little Horse, 2012, oil, acrylic, pencil drawing, glued paper on canvas, 165 x 195 cm, Charim Gallery, Vienna, © courtesy Charim Gallery Vienna, PhotoJan Freiberg

unsettling. In Coming Home a motherand child face a ruined place whereonly the gate remains, but rocks andmountains separate them from theirhome – peaceful and inviting but farout of reach. Hernan Bas, a Miami-bornand Detroit-based artist’s work alsotakes place in the outdoors. His fall2012 exhibition at Galerie Perrotin,Paris, Thirty-six Unknown Poets (or,decorative objects for the homosexualhome) shows the influence of theliterature and artistic culture at the endof the 19th century as well as televisionand digital imaging. The acid hues andpixelated texture depict young men in

romantic poses, reminding us equally ofimages from Egon Schiele and Britishfairies. A pair of those fairies/poets areplaced in a landscape that looksbeautiful at first sight until werecognize that all the trees are deadand painted with bright colors (TheHallucinations of Poets (2012). The twoyoung men are mesmerized by thisvision – real or imaginary – but at thesame time they are also shocked andthreatened by being trapped in thisforest. The poets’ walk becomes agothic vision that fills the forest withtheir hallucination but also emphasizestheir loneliness in nature.

German artist Martin Eder is also aphotographer which you can easilyrecognize from his realistic paintings.The two young women in sexyunderwear in Fortress (2012) could beprinted in a magazine if they didn’t lookso sad and vulnerable. Their pose isalmost provocative but the flesh ontheir legs is diseased, caused most likelyby the strange atmosphere of the alienplanet behind them. Where are they?Not on Earth but out somewhere in anunknown and unfriendly universe. Theyseem to be lost and lonely. Eder saidthat he wants to depict the “wholedisaster and monstrosity of ourrelationships.” The girls became victimsof their trust in someone who put themin this miserable fortress. Most of theCentral and Eastern European artists’work comments on home and safety assomething they lost and cannot replace.Serban Savu paints the Romanian urbancityscape and its ugly, grey, concretebuildings occupied by people forced tomove there from their villages. Theysurround the buildings with smallgardens, a nostalgic attempt to keep

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Attila Szücs, Sisters, 2012, oil on canvas, courtesy ofthe artist and Erika Deak Gallery JM

Hernan Bas, The Hallucinations of Poets (painted forest), 2010, acrylic, airbrush and block print on paper,152.72 x 132.08 cm, courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery © the artist

their identity. In a similar landscape,Marius Bercea makes abandonedbuildings look bearable by paintingthem with beautiful colors, while DavidSchnells’ landscapes cry out for somestabilization. They depict an abstractedversion of the cityscape and thesurrounding nature in a state ofexplosion (Bay). We are furtherconfused by several vanishing pointsthat give us a feeling of a comingdisaster.

Justin Mortimer’s paintings areoutstanding with their cruel beauty andvirtuous figurative style. Mortimer uses“bruised” colors to paint scenes ofisolation, decay and collapse. They

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Above: Justin Mortimer, Bureau, 2011, oil on canvas,184 x 224 cm AmC Collezione Coppola, Italy. PhotoAnna Anca

Right: Martin Eder, Fortress, 2012, oil on canvas,187 x 244 cm, courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig,Berlin, Hause & Wirth, © Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig,Berlin, Hause & Wirth. Photo Uwe Walter, Berlin,HUNGART

record ghastly events in seeminglyabandoned buildings and grandnarratives of modern violence. Theexquisitely painted figures and objectsare held in one area of the compositionand emphasized by the vast amount ofdark empty space. Mortimer’s storiesengage us with untold horrors andbrutality in a manner that forces us outof our comfort zone. His paintings areloaded with ambiguities and he iscareful not to tell us the whole story.Born with a twisted tibia, the artist hadto go through many operations andhospital visits and draws on his vividmemories and nightmares of that time.The man in Bureau (2011) is in physicaland psychological distress, surroundedby medical apparatus. The “office” isrepresented by a desk, a phone and abeautifully painted green folder. Behindit there is another, very different world.A half-naked man tries to hold onto ahospital gurney while large air-tubes arereleased from a broken ceiling. Whatdoes his strange swimming movementmean? Is he trying to escape from theroom or find safety in it? What kind of

monster is lurking in this maze andconfusing him? It seems that he doesn’treally know where he is, only that he islost and alienated in this place. LikeMortimer’s other protagonists, he is aprisoner of his surroundings as well ashis own body.

Chantal Joffe with her singlefigures creates a hybrid representationof feminine identity. The women areposing in generic positions but it is thepaint itself rather than socio-politicalideas that lend her paintings complexity.Her splashy brushstrokes and drippingpaint give us the feeling that hermodels are crying. The Hungarian AttilaSzücs surrounds his figures with emptyspace and strange otherworldly light(Sisters, 2012). He tries to “dissolve thealready defined and often falsestructures, and introduce new types oflooking” to show unseen auras and“kinetic” fields.

There are a lot of sad, even tragic,portraits in the show. Victor Man paintstwo men who are trying to bury theirfaces in snow. Mircea Sucin’s figure iscovering his face with his hands in

Human Stain. In Alexander Tinei’sFamily (2011) everyone’s eyes arecovered with some unknown materialmaking them look like criminals andindeed the standing boy seems to betrying to choke the seated one. DanielPitin’s Little Horse (2012) is falling apartand the horseman is wounded andfaceless but still poses as a hero.

If there was ever any doubt aboutfigurative painting in the last 30 years,then this show is proof of itsresurrection. These artists make a heroiceffort to find the answers to thequestion: Can we face the world andourselves in it? As the poet DavidWhyte asks in Self-Portrait, “if youknow / how to melt into that fierceheat of living / falling forward / thecenter of your longing. I want to know/ if you are willing / to live, day by day,with the consequence of love / and thebitter / unwanted passion of your suredefeat.” The artists in this show seemto find a solution to this cruel dilemmaby escaping into the present, facingtheir fears and embracing the darkness.

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Alexander Tinei, Family, 2011, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, collection of Imre Balogh

Chantal Joffe, Untitled, 2010, oil on board, 244 x183 cm, private collection, London, courtesy ofVictoria Miro Gallery, London, © the artist