The Ego and Its Technogothic Shadows
The Ego and Its Technogothic Shadows
Gábor Koós: Dark Matter (Inda Gallery)
In 2016, Alain Badiou’s Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color was published—a work by one of the most influential thinkers of contemporary French philosophy. The book, surprising in its tone and scope compared to his larger system-building works, can be read as a kind of lyrical digression. It is overall a much more personal and accessible essay, which explores the conceptual and sensual universe built around black as a “non-color.” Rather than a conventional philosophical treatise, the volume reads more like a meditative text that touches on aesthetic, scientific, psychological, and erotic registers. Drawing on anecdotal memories and poetic imagery, Badiou develops his reflections on black, which he does not simply regard as the absence of light but interprets as the mysterious site of meaning, desire, truth, and aesthetic experience.
From the vantage point of today’s identity politics—shaped and often dominated by neoliberal capital interests, and strongly influencing contemporary art discourse—the political dimension of the book may appear its most pressing. Particularly relevant is Badiou’s insistence that black and white, as categories of racial classification, are not only arbitrary but also philosophically untenable, given that the human skin tone exhibits infinite gradations that cannot be grasped through fixed identities.
Yet the text’s primary merit arguably lies not only in this critique, but more fundamentally in Badiou’s philosophical demonstration—grounded in personal experiences and traversing fields as varied as psychology, astronomy, critical race theory, (in)aesthetics, and politics—of the core objective of his intellectual project: the search for truth through various “procedures.” Thus, for instance, black becomes a generative surplus in the examination of its erotic and cultural layers, approached through personal and collective experiences. At the same time, in his reflections on the “blacks” of contemporary digital culture’s hyperreality, Badiou meditates on the progressive disappearance of the object of desire. We might also point to his interpretation of the French painter Pierre Soulages’ concept of outrenoir (“beyond black” or “black beyond”), which for Badiou becomes an aesthetic experience that pushes the boundaries of perception. Meanwhile, the paradoxes of black holes and dark matter represent, in the language of cosmology, the unity of absence and excess.
In the context of interpreting Gábor Koós’s upcoming exhibition entitled Dark Matter, I also believe that Badiou’s multifaceted reading of black—expanding from the personal to the universal, from the individual to the collective, from the psychological to the cosmic—offers exciting points of reference. Even if, at first glance, one might be tempted to interpret the exhibited works as sculptural performances of artistic identity—since these 3D-printed objects are in fact based on photometric scans of self-portraits—they almost invite interpretation through the lens of psychological categories of self-analysis. Moreover, they are deeply embedded in an art historical tradition in which the artist’s self-representation simultaneously functions as collective documentation, artistic self-definition, and an allegory of art itself.
The exhibition’s works no longer explore matter solely in the cosmic sense, but place it in orbit around the psyche. For instance, if we view the space from the central sculpture that functions as the installation’s epicenter—a piece that depicts a puppet-like figure modeled by the artist himself, in which he portrays himself both as a rabbit and as a leashed dog—we may read this as the ego’s internal duality, its self-disciplining, self-regulating mechanism. These two opposing potentials—the playful, instinctive rabbit and the disciplined, controlled dog—are kept in constant tension by the ego, which simultaneously offers and restrains them as possibilities.
Moving from this point leftward, toward the chained dog figure, the next space presents works that thematize the dissolution of the ego and the fragmentation of identity. Here, the ego appears as a multiplying, amorphous mass, nearly unrecognizable due to its excessive proliferation—an ego-figure in which the boundaries between “self” and “non-self” become blurred, and self-identity mutates into a kind of swarm-like, posthuman multitude.
In the opposite direction, the exhibition reveals a process in which the individual ego is propelled forward by its alter egos, appearing as shadows. This progression gives rise to a tension between the ego’s social aspect and its repressed, unconscious layers. It is no coincidence that in Koós’s latest works, the different qualities of black also appear in sculptural terms: the glossy, epoxy-like surfaces may be read as the ego’s glittering, social face—reflecting the presence of other egos as well. In contrast, ego-fragments transformed through identity metamorphoses—such as posthuman figures resembling rabbits or dogs—emerge on silky, matte surfaces, as if the material itself were expressing a psychological state.
Especially intriguing are those sculptural fragments that reveal the internal structure of the figures: these are coated with a special black nanotechnological material that almost completely absorbs the vibrations, light, and energy of the external world. This substance—not merely a color but a technological surface—evokes the dark strata of the unconscious, the lower, archetypal realms of the psyche, as if drawing the collective imagination downward.
The peculiar trophies—torsos—scattered throughout the exhibition space allude to attempts at ego-liberation, yet they simultaneously represent the futility of such efforts. Their classically sculpted forms recall ancient memories of the hunt, sacrificial rites, and the economy of prey. At the same time, these torsos also point to the hybrid nature of such attempts at escape: these figures can, at best, only temporarily free themselves from their own dark demons.
It is as if Hans Rudi Giger’s dystopian, techno-gothic visions of the 1980s were brought to life in a post-digital sculptural nightmare, where every three-dimensional object has its own ghostly, psychotic “shadow,” while also suggesting a hyperrational, network-like “superego.” These extended entities may also correspond to the “geopolitics of the cloud”—those planetary-scale abstract data conglomerates formed through global infrastructures—which Koós Gábor deliberately marks, or rather enhances, by preserving the traces of 3D printing technology. Through the printed outputs of photometric scans that sometimes glitch or fragment into distorted mesh structures, he consciously elevates various post-digital glitches, breaks, and ruptures into an aesthetic form. The dialectical tension between reality and hyperreality, between material sculptural substance and immaterial digital code, is most clearly perceptible in references such as the revealing of polygonal mesh structures—surface, volume, and proportion traces that allude to point cloud–based photometric data-scanning techniques.
Koós Gábor’s exhibition is pervaded by a psychological depth that also plays a central role in Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the shadow. According to Jung, the shadow is the unconscious, repressed, often dark aspect of the self, but it is also a necessary part of the complete personality. The shadow is not merely the repository of negative or rejected traits—it also harbors creative energy and the potential for psychic integration. In this sense, Koós’s post-digital sculptures are not simply technologically distorted self-portraits or representations of identity fragmentation, but rather complex visual metaphors that reveal the deep-psychological dimensions of the contemporary self.
The figure of the artist confronting himself—who is at once a rabbit, a dog, a torso, or a digitally glitched spectral body, and most frequently the model most directly available in the studio, a primal imprint—seems engaged in an ongoing, intense dialogue with his own shadow. The various materialities of black—the socially reflective self in epoxy, the transformative process glimpsed through matte satin surfaces, or the cosmologically dense, light-absorbing nano-blacks—each mark the multifaceted presence of the shadow. The post-digital body is not only a technological copy, but also a representative of the unconscious: it simultaneously expresses the ego’s fears, desires, and that depth from which the shadow speaks.
In this sense, Koós Gábor’s sculptures are not merely identity imprints or synthetic technofossils, but also psychological apparatuses: experiments in the visualization and integration of the shadow. The exhibition, in this psycho-cosmic drama of dark horizons, becomes more than a self-reflexive gesture. Before our eyes, a theatrical aesthetic space unfolds—one in which the viewer, too, is compelled to confront their own dark, black materials from which the unconscious takes form, the digital body becomes organic, and personal cosmology turns into tangible reality. And in doing so, perhaps for a moment, the possibility of an integrated self is revealed.
- Zsolt Miklósvölgyi