A World Seen as One Luca Korodi: NGC 7293 in the Rumbach Synagogue By Endre Lehel PaksiIt is always a joy when contemporary art flashes into a sacred space, especially one that is either no longer in use or still functioning as a community venue. But the joy is even greater when this occurs within perhaps Hungary’s most harmoniously proportioned interior, the Rumbach Sebestyén Street Synagogue. No longer measured by scholars, rather, no longer measurable the dome of the sky is tailored to human scale above the earth, offering visitors a place where the body feels at home on Earth. This interior, since I first set foot inside, has stood out as a profoundly distinct experience amidst the increasing contrast of other walkable spaces. Like the church space in Kiscell, it provides a stunning framework—one that demands collaboration rather than opposition. Korodi Luca’s installation, created specifically for this place, gains an entirely unique set of meanings here.It’s not necessary to know that the title of the exhibition refers to an astronomical object catalogued as NGC 7293 popularly known as the “Eye of God” nebula. It is enough to perceive the floor below the building’s dome as our own sphere the Earth, the realm of the human, which here is symbolized by the ground. On this surface, we find the image of Earth. Korodi’s painting has often embraced fragmented forest views and compositions without a central focus. Her landscapes were filled with motif-like elements, but her goal was always to condense life into a single image not to lose herself in details, but to compose a world seen as one from the sum of its parts.Here, that approach becomes quite concrete offered in a simple form that requires no intellectual gymnastics or prior knowledge. On the floor beneath the dome, within a 4-5 meter wide ellipse, a layer of glass shards appears. Beneath these shards, old stage light color filters emerge, modulating the visual tones. White glass indicates water-covered regions; green glass marks landmasses. Below the water, blue filters; under the land, brown. In some places, green and brown-glass fragments blend. A mandala for fakirs: a collection of dangerous, painful fragments that reflect and transmit light. During a daytime walk, the colored light filtering through the synagogue’s stained-glass windows further enriches the visual experience.With this material use, Korodi clearly takes a position contrary to the mindset often described as central to autism: a disjointed, non-integrative perspective. She resists the trend—widely embraced in art and often underpinned by constructivist phenomenology that celebrates a de- and recontextualization of familiar elements without teleological meaning or authorship. While this aesthetic, supported by scientific paradigms, has many prominent practitioners in Hungary (Katarina Sević, Zsolt Tibor, Beatrix Szörényi, etc.), it tends to erase the artist in favor of process or structure.Korodi’s work, in contrast, seems to have discovered a universal minimum that is not tied to individual identity, and can be related to by any fellow human being thus, identity- and culture-independent. In the end, it also rejects the idea that a non-neurotypical worldview could ever offer a hospitable description of reality. Here, the world is indeed seen as one, expressed through a gaze that is never explicitly named, but the installation nonetheless communicates a demand for a mode of thought that transcends the arbitrary chaos of postmodernism. I like to call this new humanism a language suited for cooperation.The short-lived, bodily walkable exhibition had an additional highlight: four of the artist’s works previously shown in New York displayed in a space with wildly decorative wall coverings where African ornamentation and contemporary painting embraced. Only one of the four retained a piece of those visually stimulating textiles. On it, as in the installation and in the other paintings, color filters were applied resulting in a strange, experimental waste-collage. The visual references were powerfully evocative of Merzbau or Constructivism, and the proportions and directions of the composition evoked abstract landscapes. The canvas had punctured holes evoking not only material shortages typical of wartime, but also traces of direct violence. Or perhaps this perforation is already the rusted cauldron of an inverted sky?One of the other paintings deviated least from Korodi’s previous works: a continuation of her urban landscape series. On a trapezoid-shaped canvas, both small- and large-scale city elements appear simultaneously skyscrapers and shantytowns typically unseen together. As if monkeys (recalling earlier ornamental legacies) were moving between these two otherwise inaccessible urban zones here unified painted in a strikingly illusionistic aerial perspective. These ornamental elements function both in foreground and background, reminiscent of the figure of the spirit in our visual tradition. Enhancing this, the painting also contains patches of pigment that respond to ultraviolet light its natural and UV-lit states are equally valid.Korodi’s further light experiments take center stage in the subsequent images urban lights at night return this time from Mexico City. Not her native terrain, thus the works are more distanced in tone not attempting to articulate a local atmosphere or emotional density. These are naturalistic framings and perspectives of night roads and various glowing objects, cleverly rendered not with separate light sources but again with those same color filters. While Malina’s lightboxes presented quasi-sci-fi visions never before seen, Korodi fertilizes the Hellenistic-photographic image tradition with the logic of the lightbox. / Endre Lehel Paksi , art historian,2012, Balkon art magazine