Online catalogue / Billy Roisz :

The random choreography of colorful, flashing screen signals that sink back into black, has its appeal. The artist Billy Roisz knows it well; she is a specialist for electronic abstraction, the aesthetics of visual distortion is one of her areas of activity. In Zounk! the play of horizontal, and later also vertical lines becomes ever more complex, step by step, transforming into series of flickering grids that also seem complex in terms of their color dramaturgy. What is first limited to black, white, and yellow, is soon expanded by red, green, and blue; and in the end again sinks into the great darkness. The images are triggered by the soundtrack, connected with its frequency: the meta rock collection, Broken.Heart.Collector’s piece called “Eisenwalzer.” The piece begins with stylized guitar noise erecting metalic partitions before singer Maja Osojnik works her sonorous recitation up to vocal ecstasy.
In a variety of ways, Zounk! plays on the history of abstract art, harboring references to Hans Richter’s geometries of motion from the 1920s, Piet Mondrian’s right-angled color compositions, and Oskar Fischinger’s abstract film music. Billy Roisz likes to produce her works using her own, homemade picture-manipulation apparatuses, trusting the logic, the independent existence of the machines. zounk! is a good example of the charm of low-threshold aleatori: Roisz generates her visual material with analogue techniques, using video mixer and transducer—she first switches to digital in the video montage. The result is an idiosyncratic mix of brutality and tenderness: image-sound art rising like a fenfire for people with modern nerves.
(Stefan Grissemann)