‍

‍

For Zsolt Olaf Szamódy, the sea is most meaningful when viewed from the shore. Making use of both the honesty and sensitivity of the film roll, Zsolt seeks to capture the image which the people of the sea – sailors, fishermen, adventurers and lonely wolves of the sea – shaped in the course of generations. The image that now can only be put together from the lore of the past.

In his works, he eliminates, without hesitation or compromise, any human presence and palettes, because representing them comes with the allure of narrative and painterly platitudes. The marks left by the people of the sea appear as curious fingerprints: they are interesting, tender, transient. As he reveals these marks, a special, poetic archaeology materializes in Zsolt’s pictures, that of a shore long polished by civilization—and gradually, it regains the pristine freedom that marked it in time immemorial.

‍Ramona Novikov