Zágon Szentes

Zágon Szentes is a photographer, painter, and advertising graphic designer from Miercurea Ciuc who is currently based in Cluj. With his photographs he is communicating in the simplest way possible, he chooses exact and well-defined themes and frames. Although his pictures are quite often powerfully dominated by the variety and dialectics of shapes, volumes and textures and are built on contrastive so called colourstories/events, the intensity of his photographs are not exactly heartwarming, but moreover create a certain distance or something exotic, which is always effective because of the power of peculiarity, this being a photo taken in a village in Csíkszereda, or a photo taken on an island in Croatia. His images are filled with tension because of a strange contradiction, and this does not turn out to be dramatic, but rather results in some kind of a chilly gracefulness. The vision in his paintings is similar to the one in his photographs, his technique is characterized at the same time by the solutions used painting and in graphics too. Some of his works can be interpreted to be coloured graphics. His powerful, vigorous and playfully contrasting colourstories are filled with particular and unusual creatures. These fabled and grotesque, often comic book like paintings suggest bizarre stories that are surreal in such way that are at the same time objectively staged sympathetic characters/spectacles/ constructions. Zágon’s activity as a book illustrator is also outstanding; he illustrated the covers of hundreds of mainly contemporary Transylvanian literary volumes, with this adding an extra drop of colour to the Transylvanian design palette.

art historian Eszter Túros

Selected Works