"I have the power to build a time machine." - Donnie Darko
The impact of characters from our favourite childhood fairytales lessens over the course of growing up. They tend to lose their original significance, even though once they were playing a central role in the development of our personalities. These stories filled with magic and usually twisted with an educational outcome, as well as the individual characters within them are built with the intention of teaching and sensitizing the younger population. For example, there’s Belle, the heroine of The Beauty and the Beast who although not being a princess, still projects the image of an enlightened and intelligent young lady. However, as time goes on, anyone can realize that knowledge is not only power, but it can also be a huge burden too. The idyllic state of childhood "ignorance" is approaching its undoing (that is becoming an adult in the psychological sense) like a timebomb coming to its moment of detonation. Reaching a climax in our gradually accelerating and developing life *BANG* (like in comic books) we can no longer believe in it, thus magic ceases to exist: Tinker Bell goes down by the flyswatter of adulthood, the iconic figure of Aladár Mézga grew up with us and got sucked into the world of graffiti, from which viewpoint Sergeant Pityke also appears in this exhibition, yet another of the many iconic Hungarian animated series character to love.
0036mark utilises one of the many tools of postmodern art, which is also excellent for institutional criticism, a kind of appropriating attitude in his artistic activities. However, in his case, we are talking about a more complex phenomenon than simply borrowing characters! Not only does Mark cross well-known fairy-tale characters with fictional and real personas, but he also affixes additional layers of meaning to the resulting composition filled with classical, modern, or contemporary (pop)cultural references. For the full interpretation of his works, one requires a general knowledge of art history as well as familiarity with cult films of the 20-21st centuries and with the Hungarian and Soviet animated films before the change of regime.
