Peter Rónai is a multimedia artist, video art pioneer and educator. His activities have been characterised by a strong inclination towards intermedia overlaps since the 1970s, when, as a student and recent graduate of the painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, he became interested in collages, original texts and visual poetry. Around the same time, experimental printmaking and photography became important areas of his work, which he studied more intensively during his postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Moreover, the more culturally liberal environment of the Hungarian capital gave him easier access to contemporary publications and exhibitions of foreign art, which contributed to a consolidation of the conceptual and post-conceptual direction of his work.
The frequent use of reproductive techniques and work with photographic fragments, with reference made to the tradition of constructivist montages, led Rónaie to a definitive departure from the traditionally based medium of painting in the direction of object and action art. Although he continued to create multi-layered assemblages in the 1980s, most of his works had already acquired an expressive austerity free of more complex creative devices. Their predominant element became the disruption of established aesthetic categories and an interrogation of the media used. Under these circumstances, Rónai also began to carry out his first experiments with video, which in their early phase ranged from the projection of formally simpler photomontages, to the creation of more complicated works related to more complex socio-political themes. A typical example would be his manipulated interventions in Czechoslovak Television broadcasts (Soukromé promítaní / Private Projection, 1985), in which he negates the television image by taping over it with modified photographic films.
Since the late 1980s, Rónai has tended to create composed objects and video installations. In particular, he is known for the placement of proportionally smaller monitors in non-standard spatial layouts, often supported by playful titles that provide a key to deciphering the works’ ambiguity. His first significant presentation of this format was in 1989 for the Cyprián Majerník Gallery in Bratislava (Objekt/Subjekt), where he exhibited a constructed specimen of black squares (Předvečer suprematismu / Eve of Suprematism, 1988). The obvious reference to the central work of Kazimir Malevich was repeated here by the television set placed against the white wall of the exhibition space, which, however, subverted the unambiguous reading of the main semantic level of the installation with its independent broadcast, while also analytically thematising the nature of the image itself.
The full development of Rónaia’s distinctive approach to video art took place only during the 1990s, when the political, cultural and social situation changed. A topic he frequently engaged with pertained to the specific position of the artist and art as such, to which he responded by applying the strategy of self-mystification and self-modification. In addition to working with his own imagery (Camera Obscurna, 1992), Rónai’s related video installations also dealt with communication with the viewer, who in many respects became an active element of the constructed hybrid situation (Konec světa / The End of the World, 1992). Rónai returned to similar principles after 2000, when he began to link them with representations of personal archives and human memory (the Mixed Memory exhibition, Jána Koniarek Gallery, Trnava 2007).
In the context of action art, the collaboration with Július Koller, with whom he performed in the group Nová vážnosť (1990–1993), was particularly important for Rónaie. Their joint work, which polemicised the status of culture in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, was usually coded by the sign of a wave, which became a vehicle for different interpretations. In addition to their shared symbolism, the pair also created individual signatures and ciphers. While Koller used the abbreviation U.F.O. (Universal Futurological Image; from 1970) in combination with a question mark, Rónaie was identified by the abbreviation O.F.U. (Opposite Functioning Art; from 1988) with a diagonal strikethrough.
At the same time, the artist’s work in the field of experimental graphics and photography was also evolving, especially thanks to his more advanced control of computer and reprographic editing and digital post-production. Within this framework, not only manipulated reproductions of canonical works (the series Hommage á hommage – MUTT R, 1990–1991) were created, but also a series of self-portraits (Selfmutation – Auto(R)transformations, 1991) often integrated into more complex video installations (Cogito ergo kunst, 1994).
The problematisation of the status of art and its meaning is also an important axis in Rónai’s recent work. In the past few years, formally large-scale installations analysing his own status as creator and the nature of the particular medium used have merged with strategies of reconstruction and deconstruction, creating a framework for the artist’s representative retrospectives (Retro naj…, Trnava Synagogue 2014; Post Ping Pong, East Slovak Gallery, Košice 2015) and ironic exhibition projects (Opačne fungujúce umenie, Galéria G19, Bratislava 2019).
