2014. július 27., vasárnap

ABSENCE



Emptiness. Air is “empty” – says the small child. With a bit of time, s/he knows that even empty space cannot be imagined as empty: there too, is material existence. There, where the God of earlier man lived, and where the audacious vision of 20th-century man was projected, Nothing. Formerly, then, immaterial existence, later non-existence.
There was a time when I often moved from flat to flat, though people who have gone beyond their youth generally reach an understanding, take possession of the part of the world coming to them. But I constantly found myself in the spaces of strangers: there was their trace, the colours they had chosen for the walls, the tiles, one or two ruined objects, the place of their bed, the place of pictures on the wall, grease stains on the stove. We lived together in the space, we were co-owners. They were also startled by me on the street: the bodies of former people left their imprint in space.  Their place is here, stacked upon each other. They permeate each other, across different periods of time. A mass of phantoms swarms around me, flits over me, and I cleave their skeletons in my wanderings. Who knows how many people I share that little spatial fragment with that my body fills.
What is it rather that there is? The wall or the window? Material or emptiness? Is it easier to comprehend the reality of the window – its immaterial existence and its non-existence, if it is filled by a wall of stacked heavy bricks? Hardly. On the contrary! Nevertheless: bricked-up windows hang in the air. They are so much there, that grass has even broken through their tops. Vegetation transforming absence into existence. And there, where walls usually stand in a reality absurd from here, there is likewise grass and oblivious cows.
(Margit Ács)

2014. július 20., vasárnap

THE "CHATEAU"

The Chateau is the fascinating spectacle of a chateau, most likely due to its symmetry: its left and righthand sides are each other’s mirror-images. In the upper portion of the picture, a classical provincial castle stands in a garden that appears infinite, among the regularly clipped buxus. The proud proprietor – architect by profession – invites us for a walk, so that we can marvel at the lake made according to his plans before his house. We set off into the garden through the lefthand portal, and reaching the lake, we turn right. Standing at the first staircase, we learn that the owner swims here every morning, and he delights in the reflection of the castle, if the ducks don’t disturb the water. Following the banks of the lake, we arrive at a junction. “Let’s go left, to the enormous vase,” suggests the host. “You don’t even realise, do you, that we are trudging upwards – just take a look down at the column supporting the vase.” And now I see that we really have come higher, without any slope.  “Incredible,” I marvel. “This is nothing,” he calls back to me, as I follow him to the next staircase. Glancing down, I am taken aback: the lake is nowhere to be seen, but it is rather as if I were looking up toward the castle from somewhere below. Instead of the ducks, birds fly in the sky. “Just come to the corner, don’t be afraid,” encourages the host, seeing my stupefaction. “From there, you can comfortably survey everything.” From the corner, the path inclines precipitously, and to the right a chasm gapes. From the next bend, once again level, it leads back to the castle, on the other side of the lake. But we are returning to the house just the same way we came. “Have you ever gone completely around the lake?,” I inquire. “I haven’t, myself,” my guide shakes his head, “but not long ago I had mountain climbers come visit, who were able, with their equipment, to get across to the other side. I usually get across to the far side by going in the other direction from the house, but there only until the path does not become too steep.”
I will never forget this marvellous, fascinating and frightening garden stroll.
Bruno Ernst (Hans de Rijk)

2014. július 18., péntek

THE ISLAND



The elements constituting the composition, often doubled, sometimes quadrupled, generate a unique order, system… The figure with one leg crossed over the other – perhaps half-sitting, half-reclining. Perhaps – because we cannot see more of his body than his two legs and one of his hands, as it touches his crossed leg, holding a burning cigarette between his fingers. And all this appears once again: in the crags of the island before us, a copy of the two legs and a hand mentioned above is distinctly visible. This time looming through the forms of the rock. It is as if the figure visible only one-third, located in the bottom third of the picture, were surveying himself in the forms of the cliffs.

   Is this all an optical game? Or the one seeking balance creates these symmetries? These mirror-images? Because this way, completion can arise? This way, counterbalanced, which is overly lacking? This is how the world can be whole? Or by chance, just the opposite? The world is like this? Divided? Broken up into opposing elements? Conflictual? And this is where its dynamic lies? The synthesis of opposites is inherent in its duality?

   Elsewhere, multiple repetitions. Series of repetitions. Exactly the same on a smaller and smaller scale. Page-turning hand in the book for the umpteenth time. In another composition – in a variant of the Island mentioned above – three islands accumulate, so to speak, upon each, the first the island of man, the second depicted as real, overgrown with thick vegetation, and the third above. What has raised it? The imagination? A mirage? A cloud acting as island? Enigmatically, and visible only to those who have the ability to see that which is there beyond? To those who have passage to the other side? Or let’s just put it this way: this is more than physical reality, the visible nature of physical reality; this is metaphysics?

(Eszter Dobozi)

2014. július 17., csütörtök

THE ABANDONED PLACE



The abandoned place of Queen Elizabeth
This ghost drawing depicts me, when I was three-and-a-half in Eskü (Vow) Square, which was the name of the playground that existed in the place of the carpark sprawling around the foot of today’s Elizabeth Bridge, if I am not mistaken: the pathetic remains of a decorative park, pompous before the war, in the vicinity of the abutment blown up into the Danube, which nevertheless in the autumn of 1952, when I was three-and-a-half, was merely a ruined vacant lot and playground.
In the background was the gigantic stump of the corroded abutment.
I am visible in the picture at that eternal moment when I discovered that the enormous seated statue carved of black marble of Queen Elizabeth, the idol of my grandfather’s generation, the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, was missing in a dreadful way from the centre of the diminutive marble colonnade standing in the middle of the square, which was the reason that my grandfather and I had wanted to come to this square to play.
I sat on Sissy’s knee quite often, sobbing, or happily.
I look like Hermes in the picture, because that’s who I am. Such things come out clearly in a ghost drawing. I am disturbed because I cannot understand how the goddess, Queen Elizabeth, could vanish from here from one day to the next. I stamp my feet on the place of her throne. Until today, I am standing there. From one day to the next, she disappeared. Then they set to destroying the stone baldachin, most probably during the night, when I was unsuspectingly sleeping in my railed cot. And then after lunch, we came out and I dashed into her place. And ever since, I scamper around in it, petrified in its loss, tramping its empty place in the mourning that I feel. Waving farewell, in all probability to any sort of order and dignity, for a lifetime.
(Mihály Kornis)

2014. július 16., szerda

ARCHITECTURE AS METAPHOR



Orosz uses architecture as a metaphor for mental framework. Bafflement in architecture = bafflement in perception and thus in understanding. Classical forms stand in as a kind of alphabet, but the words and sentences composed from this alphabet twist around and negate themselves in the vertigo-including manner of a Moebius strip. They are symbolic representations of contemporary episodes of displacement, like those in plays by Samuel Beckett. Orosz fragments the border between reality and hallucination, wakefulness and dreaming. Lovely icons of the Golden Age are depicted in ruins, their parts misaligned.  It is as if the artist has pressed, like a flower, the physical world from three to two dimensions, and in the process, parts have unattached and then reattached strangely. The jolt of the “mistake” – in the image and in the viewer’s perception – is always there. Look again and there it is again. The eye perceives, the brain registers, the nerves lurch. Every time.
(Roberta Lord)

2014. július 7., hétfő

JOHANNES DE EYCK FUIT HIC

Barren room, boxlike metaphysical space. Hoogstraten or Magritte – I might say. The pattern of the checkerboard floor approaching us aggressively breaks up the plane, and withdrawing from us – now we can see it! – “runs out” of the space through the mirrors.
The space of the present. Mr Giovanni Arnolfini looks back at us from the aperture struck through the dim memory of past eras. The large work is a window to the past, a window open only a slit. The distance is not merely spatial. Looking forward, we glance back. Periscope.
Does the playful-taut geometry of perspectives and reflections refer to space or time?
Following the path of the bouncing ray of light, the reconstructable fantasy places the figure behind the scene of the empty panel of the door, taking its point of departure from the volatile mirror-image – as it should. The riddle is solved.
But the gaze obsessively scanning further cannot release itself from its viewpoint in the labyrinth of the kaleidoscopic mirror-image. Our comprehension and obvious certitude are in vain: the creature of the gentle master of visual illusion is to us only a reflected image, a disembodied phenomenon.

(György Mészáros)