I am a painter, most days. My process begins–metaphorically–at a yellowed photograph, poking its corner out of a dusty green file folder. Pulling it out, it seems mundane, but something about it strikes me. I turn the overstuffed folder upside down, letting all of its contents dump on the floor. Sitting amongst the mess of loosely-related things, I start to shuffle papers around, unsure where to begin.
Soon, it's the witching hour, and barely-legible notes line margins–I’m onto something, but it feels like trying to remember a dream. Push too hard, and it will be just out of reach. The world around me starts to re-enter. First, the pattern of the tile floor beneath the splayed papers; then, the worn upholstery of the occasional chair that used to sit in my grandmother’s house. Maybe these patterns, each with their own rhythmic repetitions, hold the key to understanding how history continues to repeat in our present.
The surface of my paintings reflects this process of unrigorous research. Of nascent connections, jumps between decades, the material touch of a curling photo and a crumbling newspaper clipping. Of the domestic and personal that inevitably color any reach towards an objective gaze. A painting begins with that anchor photograph, but I plan very little. Every addition, subtraction, and redirection is archived on the surface, as I work out what I think and where I want to ask others to look. My paintings reference contemporarily salient histories I wish I’d known about sooner, behemoth modern systems whose abuses I wish shocked me still, and textile, wallpaper, and tile patterns I find beautiful and familiar. Their real subject matter, though, is how to make sense of a world so complex, so connected, and so filled with horror and everyday comforts.
Molnar (b. 1991, Budapest, Hungary) received her MFA from New York University and her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College. Recent exhibitions include The Beauty of Politics: Oscar Bluemner and Luca Molnar at the Hand Art Center (DeLand, FL); Helybe at alt_space Gallery (New Smyrna Beach, FL); and Same Source at Art Center Sarasota (FL). She is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
