Raypainting (with Dóra Berkes)

Dorkandkozma is a pseudonym for Dóra Berkes and Péter Kozma, two artists involved in fine and applied arts who have been working together since 1995. Raypainting is one of the pair’s joint artistic achievements, a technique they have developed over a number of projects since 1996. Painted on glass and projected onto buildings or various other objects, these images have been used by Berkes and Kozma as a substitute for large-scale canvas paintings. Raypainting is now a registered trademark of Dorkandkozma.

In addition to Raypainting, Dorkandkozma have worked on the international contemporary art scene in a variety of forms. Their visual arts line includes paintings by Berkes and theatre set designs by Kozma. The young duo is also active in the international techno scene and has been in charge of visual and audio effects for various electronic music events.

The Frankhegy Festival of electronic music and contemporary art, organized by Dorkandkozma, and the musical accomplishments of DJ Dork (Dóra Berkes) have achieved recognition across Europe. Berkes and Kozma seek to establish a place for the budding avant-garde of intellectual electronic music in the existing framework of contemporary art. To achieve this goal, they have channeled their efforts into developing an international network of fellow artists, and so created an extensive art forum reaching across national and language barriers.

The Concept of Raypainting

In recent years, painter Dóra Berkes and applied artist Péter Kozma have staged several joint art projects of non-traditional dimensions and in non-traditional exhibition venues. Most of their works are multimedia projects in which action, space, projected images, and music are merged into vast artistic productions featuring active yet spontaneous audience involvement.

Projecting images onto public buildings, architectural forms, and elements of nature have led the artists to recognize, among other things, that the mode of expression offered by Raypainting can function powerfully in various areas of creative art. Continuous exploration of roots and origins have enabled Berkes and Kozma to make artistic statements and propositions concerning urban and natural landscapes at various prominent locations in big cities and elsewhere.

Raypainting is the poetry of light—a special kind of visual frottage, stone-washing, and mimicry rolled into one. As an independent genre, Raypainting constitutes a clearly defined and important phenomenon. The basic concept itself is nothing new; creating images with projectors has been a widely used method in stage set design for a long time. Raypainting, however, is more than just a simple trick deployed to create grand images.

Improving on traditional slide show techniques, Dorkandkozma use powerful stage projectors to illuminate glass paintings, which combine with the textural properties of the surface carrying the projected image to form composite works of art. The pictures are painted by Berkes after a site survey and a planning phase, which is done in cooperation with Kozma. The imaging process, as implemented by raypainters, has crystallized into something close to alchemy, as Berkes’s pictures contain not only paint and liquid chemicals but also glass particles and other solid additives on top of the glass surface.

Raypainting as a phenomenon is closely related to all forms of artistic expression based on light projection. Its precursors include various art forms that endeavored to explore color and light relations, most notably the Rayogram, László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator, the Orphism movement, or the mobile light sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer. All of these art movements sought to create a pure perceptional quality and were based on the optical/sensory/emotional impacts of a most insubstantial material: light.

Excerpt, quoted unchanged. The source also has French and Hungarian versions.