The exhibition “Last Trip to the Amazon” shows the latest works of Hungarian painter Luca Sára Rózsa, one of the most talented in her generation. 

The artist, from the beginning of her career, focused on Western philosophical and religious heritages, the deep analysis of beliefs about the origins of human psychology and behavior. Her works present humankind partly as beings of animal origin, and recall motifs of stereotypical representations of religious beliefs. Thus, she could integrate Greek and biblical traditions about the descriptions of the birth of humankind and the patterns of human relations, like love, loneliness or interdependency. 

The landscapes and the nearly naked figures recall an ideal state and existence which is either before or after the conflicts, the contradictions of civilization, the overdominated technological development, pollution, or the devastation of wars. The vision of nature on her images makes us feel a tropical climate that gives a comfortable temperature and vegetation, a paradise where there is no danger lurking. The humans in her works seem to be still—or again—in between an animal and evolutionary development; their bodies recalling the anatomy and movements of zoological beings. Even so, their movements, bodily gestures, and eye contact show interactions, which are the keys to understanding the symbolism of her images. 

To perceive her works, the viewer has to be open to noticing the psychological signs of the images, which are universal, in spite of the Western culture historical roots. The narration of the images recalls stories, situations, and emotions which are timeless, existing already in the far past and exists also in the contemporary world. The painting models situations, focusing on interaction by simplifying the circumstances to the core of the actions. The recent exhibition shows a new series of the artist, where she experiments with extending the limitations of painting by presenting a ceramic object and an embroidery in the form of installations. The topic that connects the artworks leads us to the adaptation of personal memories from her experience of an ideal family trip to the Amazon region in 2004. Being a teenager, they made an excursion by boat on the river, experiencing the isolated landscapes and vegetation, recalling the fabulous myths of how human and nature coexisted in ancient times. Luca Sára Rózsa found old photographs of this journey, which gave motifs for the nature backgrounds of her works to present her traumatic understanding of our contemporary world. The project is confronting the artist with the different mythical beliefs about the importance of water, the losses related to the changing circumstances of nature and a past personal constellation of living, and parallels with the dramatic political, economic and environmental changes of the last decades. 

The artist used this emotional experience to present this series of works, where the symbolism speaks about attachments, separation, the closeness and distances of human bodies, and how this general relation becomes universally related to the transcendent. Thus, the paintings, the ceramic face, the embroidered female body with living plants, and the Western collapsible icon-formed painting become the expression of the same meaning: who we are and what we have to do with each other to survive the troubles of the everyday.  

-- Zsolt Petrányi

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