Balint Zsako

It is nearing that wonderful holiday season, so it is time for me to strap on that metal mask of sunshine and flowers to help me get through thebrok enexchang e of shitmas. I admit that my crustiness alone flakes off to feed all the dead birds of xmas past. But fortunately, unlike Scrooge, who promotes conspicuous consumption in the end, I take solice in the Bahumbuggery of it all. Speaking of which, Balint Zsako, proverbially puts the 'dick' into Dickens for me and sheds some humanity onto this high-definition-gogogadget-plastic-plasma
thinly-venered smoke screen of ours. His work has itself darkened and matured in the fermented grounds over the last couple of years. I was able to see Balint's latest exhibition at S.P.I.N. gallery a couple of weeks ago and was hit in the gut at the refined rawness of his developing style. Sexuality, machines, ugliness and beauty all become the mythological world that has become Balint's own. The beautiful liquiforms of colour suspend and immerse symbols that recall the Myths of Creation that are then intermixed with the mechanisms of Man to be delicately affixed to the blank whiteness of the page. I don't know if the art speaks to my inner Magyar but Zsako's work is the ghost of past, present and future for me as I take in the 'miser'y of this Corporate holiday season. So, instead of getting crushed in the horde to get your 'surrogate parent' Boxx, do a 180 and take in some ART and culture (music, dance, visual or written). And please try to support the 'little' guys (preferably NOT the ones with money trees coming out of their arse). Local and/or Independent is the way to go.