Visztanza Travelling Circus, 2021

Digital graphic, archival pigment print – 841 × 594 mm

Bónyai Barbara’s Visztanza Travelling Circus, a series of thirteen digital illustrations, stands at the intersection of personal mythology, popular visual culture, and conceptual art. The project originates from a childhood dream of founding a travelling circus – a fantasy embodying creative freedom and autonomous world-building. Although this vision was eventually abandoned in adulthood upon encountering the theatrical spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, decades later the artist returned to it – reimagining and transmuting it into a visual and conceptual gesture.
The series is a significant work within Bónyai’s Popicon period, during which she delib
erately turned toward the visual language of popular culture. Her aim was not merely to generate aesthetic impact, but to explore the possibility of forging connections with a broader, non-specialist audience. Visztanza Travelling Circus is a vibrant yet multilayered manifestation of this strategy: its colourful, illustrative, poster-like style may initially appear playful and decorative, yet beneath this surface lies a complex self-reflexive structure.

Technically, the images were built on line-art foundations, then developed through a combination of colouring and stippled shading. This method blends analogue and digital components, exemplifying the cross-media approach that characterizes Bónyai’s broader practice. In its compositional and formal references, the series enters into dialogue with figures such as Kandinsky and Picasso, while the circus motif evokes a dreamlike, theatrical world akin to that of Fellini.

Yet Visztanza Travelling Circus is more than a nostalgic gesture – it is an artistic attempt at bridging the gap between contemporary art and general audiences. The series adopts a visual language that, through its decorative appeal, becomes more accessible to non-expert viewers – thus acting as a conceptual bridge between autonomous contemporary art and mass culture. During this period, Bónyai was not only producing images, but actively studying, observing, and aesthetically internalizing a visual vocabulary that might allow audiences marginalized from contemporary art to be drawn back into its orbit.

This trajectory, however, is not without tension. The effort to engage the public often proved asymmetrical: while the artist successfully absorbed the tools of popular visuality, the corresponding openness to deeper artistic content rarely materialized on the audience’s side. In this sense, Visztanza Travelling Circus is not only a farewell to a long-held personal dream, but also a poetic summation of a broader artistic experience – one that confronts the limits of visual translation and cultural mediation. By the end of the series, Bónyai finds herself “purged” of her circus-founder aspirations, but also, in a deeper sense, at the closure of a creative strategy that has run its course.

Now part of the permanent collection of the Hungarian National Circus Arts Institution, the series has taken on a symbolic dimension: the dream has been “institutionalised,” even as the artist has already emotionally and conceptually moved beyond it. Visztanza Travelling Circus is therefore not the apex of a period, but rather a conceptual crossroads – an interstitial space where popular aesthetics and conceptual depth meet. It is, simultaneously, a formal experiment, a self-reflexive confession, and a reflection on the social potential of contemporary art.
The word Visztanza itself is a neologism the artist coined in adolescence – an imagined name for her future circus. Decades later, this childhood invention lends its title to the series, preserving the dream’s original spirit even as it is transformed into art.