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Voyeurism at your own risk

One of the key concepts in Andrea Rádai’s image-driven paintings—executed with sensitive, expressive brushstrokes—is concealment and secrecy. Although these works are rooted in visual representation, almost all of them hide far more than they reveal. The framing is fragmentary, the compositions appear almost accidental, and they resemble snapshots more than traditional paintings. Faces are often blurred, and the balance between light and shadow frequently tips toward the latter.

Her canvases, painted with brilliant, loose brushstrokes, regularly feature blurring—an effect imported from photography—which lends the images a mysterious and indecipherable quality. This slightly out-of-focus, softened aesthetic also appears in the work of world-renowned artists such as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, whose influence is clearly felt in Rádai’s practice. This lineage, which places a high value on the painterly act, may also be responsible for her sensuous, intimate engagement with the material and the canvas surface.

The velvety, tactile quality of the paintings soothes the eye but leaves the mind unsettled. The small fragments of stories, scenes, and captured moments seem familiar, yet they never resolve into a complete narrative. The story remains partial or ultimately unknowable; the viewer’s curiosity—akin to that of a voyeur or a peeping tom—remains unfulfilled. A subtle tension arises, born from the uncertainty of what comes before or after the depicted instant.

Rádai’s post-digital art, through the means of painting, reflects not only on the imagery of the digital realm but also on its specific logic. The absurdity of a still image stretched across a screen—so at odds with the nature of constantly flickering digital visuals—makes us pause. It gives the impression that, as eyewitnesses to an important event, tragedy, or crime scene, we ought to recognize something unusual, something not quite ordinary. Yet our search is in vain: what we actually see are ordinary people engaged in ordinary actions, though not shown in an ordinary way. The images often evoke something from our collective visual memory—an atmosphere best described as uncanny or eerie.

Rádai frequently employs appropriation by choosing found photographs as the basis for her paintings, while at other times she herself becomes the voyeur, inviting us into the pleasurable but also ethically charged act of looking.

János Schneller, art historian