The HSE Art and Design School and Budapest Metropolitan University are collaborating on a joint project: developing visual concepts for alternative posters for Hungarian films. I chose to focus on a series of five posters for the film «Larry» (2022, Szilárd Bernáth).
I consciously chose black-and-white graphics: color would be a lie in this narrative. Larry’s life—a world of the outskirts, farms, and subterranean underground—is built on the contrast between silence and voice, humiliation and dignity. The white face emerging from dense blackness reads as a person striving to break through, to be seen, and to be heard.
Rhythmic spots and dots are the primary semantic code of this series. It’s a visualization of rap: the pulse, the beat, the trail of strikes. But I made this rhythm fractured: at times, the dots form neat columns, and at other times, they break apart and cease. This is how its stammer sounds—a voice straining to get out but getting stuck. Therefore, the spots are both music and a scar.
I constructed the pattern on the head and body in an animistic way—a reference to the farm, to sheep, to primal force. And the texture of the spray, the aerosol effect—that is the language of graffiti and hip-hop culture.