Slap Ágnes Uray-Szépfalvi

During the 1990s, Ágnes Uray-Szépfalvi produced numerous Hollywoodesque paintings that called into question the position of women and female–male relationships. Looking at the film-like, typically dramatic gestures portrayed in the paintings, one has a sense of already having witnessed the scene, even if not exactly in the same form. The artist was hugely inspired by films: “As far as films go, I felt they were almost like my life, or that my life was like a film.” She worked from film stills, which she painted in a distinctive style evocative of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often reworking individual details of the originals. The encounter between mid-twentieth-century film aesthetics and classical painting – in which, alongside the scrupulous rendering of light and shadow, artists often intentionally misdraw their images slightly – deliberately borders on the kitsch, thus creating a tension in the viewer’s mind.

This tension is reinforced by the facial expressions of the figures in Slap, which are all the more powerful for being indistinct and hard to decipher. The expression on the female figure’s face, which has apparently been turned sideways by the force of the blow, can be equally interpreted as one of pain or pleasure, while the man’s features simultaneously convey both aggression and a kind of confused indecision. Through its appropriation of a Hollywood cliché and its representation of ambivalence, the painting draws attention to stereotyped gender roles and social relationships.

Sára Major