Adam in Paradise without Eve

Endre Tót, who gained his reputation with his Art Informal paintings in the 1960s, ceased painting around 1970–1971 and started making conceptual, text/sign-based works. These “absent pictures” that establish nothingness and absence as two poles of Tót’s works consist for the most part of drawings; they also include installations, actions, film and video works, as well as works using non-traditional media such as telegrams, postcards and banners. An emblematic figure of Conceptual Art, Mail Art and Stamp Art, Tót aimed at making his practice “TÓTally against official art”, in his own words. Addressing state control mechanisms and totalitarianism, his oeuvre deals with issues related to censorship, isolation, communication and privacy.

Endre Tót’s "Adam and Eve" and "Adam in Paradise without Eve" interpret Albrecht Dürer’s “Adam and Eve” (1507), a two-panelled painting that represents these two biblical figures standing nude in full-scale. The two works are representative of Tót’s “erasure” method, a conceptual tool he uses to remove the figurative aspects of the painted subject. In both works, Tót paints two frames and inserts the caption as text on the canvas, providing only a single painterly point of reference to Dürer’s original composition. This pictorial element is the leaf (a key biblical motif associated with the tree of knowledge of good and evil) that is traditionally represented to hide both figures’ genitals. Re-framing and re-contextualising Dürer’s painting on an empty white canvas, the artist suppresses all figurative elements – except one –, leaving an abstract bare surface that visualises a void. Deviating from the conventions of traditional painting, these two works belong to Tót’s "Absent Paintings", which enable him to accomplish a return to painting but with an aesthetic of absence and disappearance. Deceptive in their title, both works provide the viewer with a non-representation of paradise that contrasts with the habitual depictions of the heavenly place from which humanity has been expelled.