Erased texts (TAB) / Erased texts (RES)

2025, giclée print, graphite pencil, 70 cm x 90 cm

The work Erased Texts explores another form of disappearance: its two large sheets focus on the gesture of erasure. Esterházy covered entries from the 1963 Petit Larousse encyclopedia with graphite—an act aimed at making them vanish, while acknowledging its impossibility. Words such as “table,” “tableau“, “tabou,” “resistance,” and “respect” physically disappear, but their traces remain on the vibrating surface. Erasure here is not final but paradoxically commemorative. This is the principle of “post-visibility”: a new way of seeing where the tension between absence and presence becomes an aesthetic stake.

Esterházy’s practice is closely connected to contemporary conceptualism’s tendencies that rethink the relationship between the document and memory. His works can be interpreted within the theoretical frameworks of memory studies and the archival turn.

text: Fruzsina Kígyós