Lads Above The Sea Of Fog

​

Panonhalma Archabbey, 2022

 

As a teenager I thought that adult life would be accounted the same way it was in high school; as a series of upward-spiraling sections of development that compares and rejuvenates the present to the past, one spring break to another. I would go to 22th grade this year. I can not arrange the ten years that passed since my graduation into any system or order at all, which probably is not a bad thing. But I do see the enormous gap between memories from my teenage years, rich in details and timecodes, and the ones from my adulthood, chaotic and non-linear. The time school was supposed to prepare me for.

 

Lads above the sea of fog pays tribute to the transformation of the teenage years, the protected but also very vulnerable in-between period that is full of emotion, passion, physical difficulties, insecurity, thirst, profanity and great-great romanticism. In the scenery of Pannonhalma, these extremes are represented spectacularly: the students of the Benedictine Secondary School grow up, hang around and grow body hair in the halls of the thousand-year-old Archabbey; the yellings during their football matches echo on the walls of the basilica.

 

In my pictures I paraphrase Caspar David Friedrich’s tematic paintings representing seasons (Walk at Dusk, Forest in Late Autumn, Winter Landscape with Church, Spring, Summer), using elements of the landscape of Pannonhalma. Friedrich’s paintings often feature human figures appearing tiny compared to the greatness of nature –on my paintings, the students of the Benedictine High School (and the teenage tourists arriving during the summer break) wander in twilight colors, under silhouettes of distant chapels, sorrounded by lonely plants and objects. However, the main characters are not entirely them –it is the ever-changing soccer field that shows its different faces throughout the year.

 

The pictures of the four seasons merge the border between the real and the fictional spaces of Pannonhalma, however, the fifth painting is not fiction at all. My visit to Pannonhalma took place on the only truly wintry day of the year, and while walking around on the tourist route, a whole class ran next to me on their PE lesson. I do not wish to rat anybody out, but there were two boys who stopped to look around at the viewpoint to cut out a round of running, standing over the white winter land and the slowly dissolving fog.