Erik Mátrai’s Screen represents a significant evolution in contemporary light art with natural and synthetic elements merging to create profound spatial experiences. This installation uses the classic proportions of CinemaScope film to frame an empty space filled with drifting haze and illuminated by a single directed light source.

Born in 1977, Mátrai studied painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, bringing a deep understanding of pictorial tradition to his multimedia installations. Screen directly engages with painting’s fundamental element: the frame. In traditional painting, the frame defines and contains the image, creating a “window into another reality”. Here, Mátrai transforms this concept by filling an empty CinemaScope-proportioned frame with swirling haze and light.

The work creates a fascinating dialogue between painting’s static nature and cinema’s movement. Traditional painting captures frozen moments in frames, creating timeless, motionless abstractions. In Screen, this stillness dissolves as swirling haze moves continuously within the frame like a living motion picture. The fog becomes both subject and medium, transforming the rectangular boundary from a container of fixed images into a stage for endless, ephemeral transformations.

Screen simultaneously evokes aesthetic questions from Renaissance perspective theory to contemporary art’s engagement with emptiness and void. Mátrai creates maximum impact through minimal intervention, inviting viewers into a carefully constructed environment of light, haze, and architectural framing that encourages reflection and evokes a sense of transcendence.

(Barnabás Bencsik)