Bortnyik Sándor, Céllövölde 1930 

Curator: Looking at "Céllövölde 1930" by Sándor Bortnyik, done in tempera. It certainly leaves an initial mark with its composition and somewhat jarring juxtapositions. What catches your eye? Editor: I am instantly hit with a kind of bizarre calmness despite the rifle! The cool palette mixed with a really surreal juxtaposition makes it feel almost dreamlike. Like some advert from a long-lost age, twisted through a cubist lens. Curator: I concur on the note of surreality. Observe how Bortnyik utilizes flattened planes, the minimal color palette. The two figures—the woman rather prominently featured with a firearm, alongside the figure of the man adjacent—the work's success hinges on a sort of disjunctive realism, wouldn’t you agree? Editor: Absolutely, especially regarding how they inhabit seemingly different dimensions! It almost has a filmic feel to it. The rifle cuts them as one object, or subject. There are all those targets, though, the hare target in the back seems so odd; like it wants you to shoot this beautiful innocent hare, like they are somehow training us, not the character holding the gun! Curator: A telling point on the unsettling targets and their broader implications. And the flatness enhances, perhaps even demands, closer consideration of line and form. Notice the starkness of the negative spaces—and then how they force a sense of spatial ambiguity... a common theme within modernism itself! The figures don't exactly share an intuitive space, as much as exist within an ordered plane. Editor: It certainly creates this detached, almost dystopian scene, an eerily stylish disquietude—not only through its stylistic arrangement but in how the woman’s hand calmly holds this sleek killing instrument. The man there is looking off in the distance, ignoring what she's doing, what's that about? Is the painting asking the same question of us as viewers? What are we focusing our attention on, and what are we not paying enough attention to? Curator: That feels apt to me. What a pleasure to examine the juxtapositions! Editor: Indeed, the rabbit hole went deeper than the eye could initially percieve!