Katalin Káldi: THE NUMEROUS ANDTHE INNUMEROUS – Repetition; the multiple application of homogeneous elements in a single artwork

In early 2012, I cast 84 plaster elements from a silicone mold made from a 2-kilogram iron barbell. Following the composition of my earlier painted works, I placed the elements in small distinct groups on the floor, but here they were not separated from each other by the picture edge or the wall. Although the medium changed, the intent remained the same: to generate signs or patterns using a real, everyday object multiplied as many times as necessary for the individual element (the barbell) to dissolve into the generated sign or pattern, just as sugar dissolves in water. Since I often paint compositions in which the same element appears multiple times, I am naturally drawn to artworks with similar structures of repetition. I am fascinated by the tension that arises between a completed pattern and its constituent elements, by the strange connection between two different languages, when different systems, each operating autonomously and smoothly, gain some slight momentum, when a statement becomes a question, when something simple becomes more nuanced, when a safe proposition becomes a random, one-off opportunity. When the regular becomes irregular. I have also begun to take an interest in examples of this multifaceted “discourse” in the works of other artists, in the ways in which order can unfold and manifest itself in randomness, and in how regularity can be found in the specific, in the momentary. After all, order is differentiated from disorder when we recognize that there is a rule.