Pal Sarkozy Werner Hornung

AL MAADEN Golf Resorts
MARRAKECH, Maroc
22 mai - 29 mai 2010

MUSEUM -GALLERY XPO
SALVADOR DALI, Brugge/Belgium
25 septembre - 22 octobre 2010

Valencia Hotel WESTIN
Février 2009

AMSTERDAM Gertrud D Galleries
Avril 2009

ABIGAIL Gallerie
BUDAPEST + Szolnok, Hongrie
Avril 2010

LE CAIRE, Egypt
Avril 2010

ESPACE CARDIN Paris
25 avril - 9 mai 2010

Something Familiar, Something Strange:
An introduction to the artwork of Pal Sarkozy and Werner Hornung


Something Familiar

The source of the Sarkozy/Hornung collaboration is a key to understanding the air of fleeting familiarity mixed with mystery that describes an encounter with their latest work.

Hungarian immigrant, Pal Sarkozy arrived in post-War Paris, a talented draftsman, soon to become an illustrator for various advertising firms. He went on to found his own successful ad agency, eventually serving such high-ticket companies as Dior and L’Oreal. Werner Hornung arrived in Paris from Germany in 1973 to put his artistic skills to work pursuing a career in advertising. He eventually set up his studio in the same office space as Sarkozy’s agency and thus began a friendship that has lasted for 35 years. During that time these two artists have succeeded professionally by keeping their eyes and ears wide open to the vagaries of popular culture and by being able to put together, from that experience, a picture of where we are and where we are headed.

They each entertained their own personal creative worlds until 2004 when they decided there were ways to combine these worlds into an original mixture of drawing styles and photographic elements. As such, their collaborative works represent a culmination of the various crossovers between Advertising and Fine Art that have gone on since the arrival of Modernism.

Although photography had made in-roads into the mix of advertising imagery, when Pal arrived in Paris much of the visual oeuvre for popular advertising still consisted of elegant pen and ink drawings or realistic compositions originally created in gouache or oils that were then prepared for the photo-lithographic printing processes which finally brought this imagery to a mass audience. Well before this period, in the world of Fine Art; Futurists, Cubists and Surrealists alike had brought industrialism, mass production and the associated psychological dissonance these created into the discussion of "what is Art" and in that process had recognized and held Advertising to be a significant artistic accomplishment. Thus began a feed back loop between Advertising and Fine Art that continues to this day.

In the 1950s, shortly after Pal established his commercial art career, Pop Art emerged in England (at least a decade ahead of its American counter-part) and not only confirmed advertising as viable Art content, but also brought what had been dismissed as "commercial" production techniques and materials into the realm of making Fine Art. Because of the close association to what is new and emerging in current culture, avant-garde Art and Advertising have always borrowed from one another. So that, by the time Werner took up this scene in the early 1970s, Photography had gained stature in the art world and new printing techniques supported a revolution in the production of advertising imagery based on photos and photographic manipulation. And, as many will remember, Surrealism with its distortions of size and dimension, juxtaposition of disparate objects and a heady mix of dreams, desires and sexuality dominated much of that commercial imagery.

At this time, among the various production techniques that Advertising borrowed from Fine Art was the "Photomontage." Individual photos combined together to create a new subject or visual image had its beginnings in the Victorian era in the form of what was called "combination printing," the printing of one or more photographic negatives on a single piece of printing paper. Montage proved to be a powerful tool for earlier Dada artists. Around 1915 George Grosz working in Berlin was instrumental in making montage into a modern art form. After the First World War, European Surrealists inherited the technique and the first retrospective of photomontage was held in Germany in 1931. In the Advertising world of the early 1970s the techniques of cut and paste, double exposure and re-processing photos reached its highest point of refinement. Though the paths are long and divergent all of these art movements, philosophies, tools and practices now appear familiar to us by our repeated exposure to their implementation in modern advertising. Even if you have never been to an art gallery the history of modern art, thought and production surrounds us daily in our streets, on the pages of our popular literature and on our electronic screens.

Something Strange

By the beginning of the 1980s, with both Sarkozy and Hornung at respective peaks in their careers something new entered the field of commercial art production. In 1981 Sony began marketing a camera that captured an image using a CCD rather than film and in 1982 Time magazine named "The Computer" its "Machine of the Year." With just a few stops and starts over the next decade digital computing entirely took over the production of commercial art. And, why not? Within one tool, a single digital computer, lies the capability to write copy, produce and edit pictures, perform page layout, share and tweak the results, prepare and send printer-ready designs to the press and instantly bill clients and receive payment. Today, there is no billboard, magazine page, newspaper, TV show, commercial or feature movie that has not been processed digitally somewhere along its production flow. If you want to see "digital art" all one has to do is open their eyes.

Early in the remarkable 20th century, Marcel Duchamp viewed technology as a key metaphor of modern society. In 1915 Picabia observed, "the machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really part of human life, perhaps the very soul." The advent of digital computing has moved this mechanical revolution into the sphere of human evolution. And, somewhat ironically, until quite recently it is commercial artists and advertisers that have led the way in applying these new tools to the making of art. It should be no surprise then that in 2004, at the very edge of a new century, Sarkozy and Hornung felt they were ready to embark on "an adventure of artistic co-creation."

True collaboration is something that one does not often see in the production of Fine Art. But, to two experienced ad-men the idea of bouncing one's concepts off of one another is an acceptable even necessary part of the process. Together they develop ideas with Pal Sarkozy often providing the underlying sketches. Then, using his talents in digital photomontage and manipulation Werner Hornung composites these sketches with photographs and a broad palette of digital imaging effects, textures and color. The resulting imagery is neither a traditional pen and ink drawing nor is it solely a product of the digital machine; rather it is a unique jewel-like mix of all of the above.

Facilitating this mash-up is the dematerializing nature of digital technology, which converts the physical world into the immaterial flow of electronic impulses. If this seems strange it is only because the art making has moved away from the traditional material world into a state that is closer to pure thought. Just as electronic impulses in our brain create the picture of the world in which we live, digital art is created in the same fashion within the confines of a hard drive. Inside that cybernetic combined space of human mind and hard drive the contents of the years in which Sarkozy and Hornung have mastered imagery that is meant to anchor ideas in the minds of those that view it gains in lucidity and opulence. The fluid nature of digital production allows the two artists to go back and forth, adding or subtracting, polishing or obscuring the imagery until they reach a consensus and the work is declared done.

The resulting compositions are then re-materialized into the familiar form and format of a traditional painting on canvas. And yet, while we may recognize the trajectory of this imagery through all the stages of Modernism and know of its links to advertising and commercial art production it still looks a bit strange to us. This is only because Sarkozy and Hornung continue to look with eyes wide open at new possibilities in the making of Art. And while they have put together pictures that represent where art has brought us, they are also creating art objects that show us where art is headed.

JD Jarvis
Digital art critic
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Exposition Sarkozy & Hornung

2008
MADRID, Pabéllon de exposiciones de la Casa de Vacas, Park El Retiro
25.6.2008 - 13.7.2008
ART ELYSEES, october 2008
VALENCIA, November 2008 - Sala de exposiciones del Ayuntamiento

2009
VALENCIA, Hotel Westin, february 2009
AMSTERDAM, Gertrud D Galleries, 12.5. -14.6.2009
MALAGA, Hotel Incosol, 5.8. - 5.9.2009
BUDAPEST, Abigail Vente au enchères 20.12.2009

2010
QATAR, Doa, Grand Hyatt 15.2. - 29.2.2010
BUDAPEST, Abigail Galeria 7.2. - 26.2. 2010
SOLNOK, Hongrie 28.2. - 8.3. 2010
CAIRO, 21.3. - 23.3. 2010
PARIS, L'Espace Cardin 24.4. - 9.5.2010
MARRAKECH, Al Maaden 22.5. - 29.5.2010
MUSEE SALVADOR DALI, Bruges 18.9. - 18.11.2010

2011
ABIGAIL Galeria february 2011
MENORCA 28.7. - 10.9.2011
MOSCOW Museum Tsereteli 23.9. - 11.10. 2011

Elected to the Russian Academie of Arts -

25 juin /13 juillet 2008
Ayuntamiento de Madrid
CASA DE VACAS