Collection: Janos Korodi

"My personal relationship with the industrial environment began in revitalized warehouses in the late 1990s. I painted under the protection of functional architecture, I was working on the painterly formulation of the environment. Industrial architecture as a function-centered, unadorned geometric medium not only provided protection and impulse-free tranquility, but its metaphysics permeated my images. Its strong character traits—just as the nervous system and muscles developed at a young age—defined my later series of paintings.

In recent years, I have combined movement, time, and the phenomenon of non-place with the metaphorical use of the road and then the bridge. After many years of insecurity caused by immigration, in the new environment, the industrial landscape greeted me once again and became the source of my visual thoughts. As soon as pictures emerged from these thoughts, I knew I was home again.

I started a project in 2020 by finding a new source material and medium to work with. I found a raw plywood sheathing and started printing uniquely selected compositions directly on the wood by keeping its patterns visible at the same time, inviting them to interfere with the image. The trashed plywood sheets with their natural patterns showing up as repetitions of ornaments on the surface made perfect backgrounds for the motion based work I’ve been dealing with.

The second series I printed on plywood I call “Light works Terminal”, it’s a series of photos of oil tanks I've made in NorthEast Philadelphia and along the Delaware River. It caught me especially how the sunlight plays on the huge, rough surfaces, with just a few objects that would stick out to cast lines and elongated, elliptical shapes of shadows on their enormous bodies. The few variable elements such as ladders and numbers reappearing on the pieces along with the changing light and shadows, and their constellations with the wooden patterns gives the series a fresh poetic air.

In a spirit of discovery and progress, I ventured into a new field with airbrush paintings after a year of experimenting with pastel powder on velour paper. This latest series represents a synthesis of my core interests with a new technique. Using high-pressure air and pigment-based acrylic paints, I have managed to translate the ephemeral qualities of light and shadow that I so admired in industrial landscapes into a new medium that offers both subtlety and dynamism."