Péter Szalay

Péter Szalay (b. 1981) is a sculptor active in Pécs, south of Hungary. Szalay develops his personal research towards seemingly irreconcilable directions: he often mockingly re-contextualizes and manipulates found objects or, on other occasions, he realizes works which analyse the formal elements of a discourse on abstract sculpture.
What makes his work coherent is what the artist defines as the theme of his own pursuit: the inquiry of the distance that separates a work of art from a common object, a distance that Szalay seeks to blend by moving between both extremes. By means of a personal, ironic, and playful approach, he brings the daily object into the artistic framework. At the same time, he performs research on the presence of pure sculptural shapes in the scientific world and in popular culture.
An example can be found in the carving, in found objects, of the shape of spherical fullerene, which is both the geometric structure of the carbon molecule and the shape of common footballs.

Friends will be friends

The starting point of my project is fullerene, a semi-regular geometric shape made up of alternating pentagonal and hexagonal facets. On the one hand, it recalls the structure of modern-day footballs, thus epitomizing this sporting discipline; on the other hand, hints at fullerene can be found in both scientific and artistic discourse since the seventeenth century.

The aim of my project is to shed light on the geometrical connection between platonic solids – those regular solids consisting of perfectly identical facets – and Archimedean ones – namely those composed of facets presenting two or more regular polygons. In sculpture, fullerenes become the joint for further Archimedean solids to which, then, all the platonic solids can be connected: the tetrahedron, the cube (or hexahedron), the octahedron, the dodecahedron, the icosahedron.

In sculpture, the various geometrical figures that are connected to each other become, therefore, a homage to science, to art and to football intended as a movement uniting people and different cultures.

Péter Szalay