Kriszta Hollai has developed a distinctive technique for articulating her visual world. She prepares a mortar similar to the material used for plastering buildings, with which she fills a pre-prepared frame. Before the mortar sets completely, she not only draws lines and shapes into it and colours it, but also embeds objects that carry various symbolic meanings.
She literally constructs her pictures. Her formal language is minimalist; she does not seek to emphasise the richness of forms, but rather their simplified nature, in order to highlight the symbolic value of the forms stretched across the plane. When she does depict space, she reduces it to a few lines drawn according to geometric principles, or achieves it through the combined effect of several planes rotated relative to one another. The tension in her visual message is created by the unreal relationship between the strongly contoured, two-dimensional representations lying within the picture’s actual plane and the embedded object elements that protrude from the picture’s actual plane into real space. Through these embedded objects, the image transcends its own plane/space into the viewer’s space, directly engaging the viewer with the image’s plane/space. Both the elements of the pictorial world and the embedded objects possess strong symbolic content linked to various well-known yet sensitive aspects of culture, and their combined presence and mutual interaction generate further symbolic meanings.
Ultimately, the content of every image can even be converted into a narrative, and in many cases it reveals interpretive possibilities that differ significantly from the usual stereotypes.