How objects-personal and impersonal- become attached to us! Aware of this intimate relationship, Gábor Leon Varga went on to highlight it in his print-based paintings. The recently graduated young artist conveyed to canvas the print of the side of a Budapest tram and ‘touched it up’ by turning a graphic work into a painting. The technique is certainly familiar. Pop Art in the 1960s was the first to create images by printing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art. Artists including Jasper Jones and Robert Rauschemberg, Lászlo Lakner and Krisztian Frey employed the frottage technique in their works.
What Varga has achieved is a kind of modern trompe I`oeiel, since he not only uses the imprint of a coat. In his works, however, the application of this technique is merely the first phase. Printed over many times, he proceeds to shape the surface with a brush, and picks a background for it. This way the end result is not the impression of a material, but the imitation of a whole scene with the print of a bicycle, a fence or as its protagonists and compositional elements. Personification.  A scene, however, we try to avoid interpreting that scene. A genre painting with a rural feel, without people. A couple, almost touching each other`s coat-sleeve with the witnesses? /escorts? / bodyguards? On either side. Who knows. The different ways in which the coat-sleeves are positioned is a giveaway. One is practically embracing, the other has its arms crossed in front, and the middle two are reaching out to touch each other. Our skins standing around in social solitude are the objects so important in our lives. Themselves and at the same time, ourselves.
Their painterliness is stunning. Chalky whites and bulky, decorative colored surfaces intertwine with minute details. In spite of this, these works are neither still life’s nor products of New Objectivity, but rather  interplay between technique and symbol, Trouville and ‘serious’ art. While living out his attachment to imprints of objects (fetishism in art form?), the young artist creates a special environment. The cold/decorative picture seeks to accomplish the authentic imprint of an impersonalized world (counter-neo-existentialism?). The over- familiar elements (fish, bicycle, fence, coat, and vehicle) lend the picture a kind of sacral character- in an age suffering from the cult of objects.
The objects become something completely different by means of a work of art, as its self-identical existence. As Heidegger points out in connection with Van Gogh’s shoes:
This work has taught us what shoes really are. […] But what this work does is not what it appears to do on the surface, that is, to better represent what a shoe- an object-is. Rather, the object`s objectness is brought to light only by the work and in the work. Van Gogh’s example, and even more Heidegger`s transformation, is powerfully present in the realistic material world Leon Varga creates. Leon Varga is a keen-eyed and quick-witted painter (I might have said sensitive). He has a sense of reduction. Restrain and modesty are very fortunate features in such a loquacious age. Possessing all artistic faculties, the artist is on the right track towards a full-blooded painterly world.