JULES VERNE AWARD

He drew a landscape from the North Pole, in which he composed the head of Jules Verne. We do not see this when regarding the picture: Verne vanishes between the icebergs. If, however, a mirrored metal cylinder is placed at the centre of the landscape, then a lifelike portrait of Jules Verne appears in the cylinder. I believe that this form of anamorphic depiction was customary in the Renaissance… I can no longer establish an István Orosz award, but since he likes my Verne film very much, if I could restore the master and replace the title credits, then I would write before the title that it is for István Orosz with sincere respect. In other words, I dedicate this film to him. (SándorReisenbüchler)

ABSENCES

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.
(Lao Tse: The Tao Teh King, chap. 11, trans. Waley)

One of the central themes of Eastern Wisdom is “nothingness”, about which Lao Tse, the Chinese sage who perhaps never even existed (his name simply means: “Old Master”), wrote the lines above. The short verse might serve as a written emblem of the Taoism hallmarked by the name of Lao Tse, as it expresses in words that which the often depicted Yin and Yang symbol relays: the real and the spiritual world, negative and positive forms, the unit linking the “is” and “is not” with each other, postulating each other’s existence.
Before I begin with lengthy explanations of my own Absence-pictures, and of the inverted world that I try to portray, I will write about a few boring technical details. The bulk of works reproduced here is printed graphic, and within that, a special genre: with photogravure, a reproduced picture. Among others, such procedures include: etching, engraving, dry-point, mezzotint, photogravure, and their common feature is that the graphic artist rubs paint into the actual absences, the eroded grooves carved from the printing-block, which are then lifted out from the negative form of the moistened paper stuffed into the grooves. The positive lines appearing in the artwork are the filling-ins of the negative arcs created by the graphic artist, in actual fact the images of absence made visible, the embodiments of nothingness.
Much has been written on the significance of absent things, and the role played in the arts by silence, often referring first precisely to Taoism, then from intervals in music, through the obscurity of ballads based on intermissions, all the way through to the great Nothing appearing in Malevich’s Suprematism and symbolising wholeness. I watched the cult film of my high school years, Antonioni’s Blow-Up, so many times that I believed that I myself saw the secret between the silver granules of the photos enlarged to infinity, that hairline void extending over the border between nothing and something, which was perhaps the visual representation of the uncertainty above the cognizability of the world, and I listened together with David Hemmings at the end of the film to the sputtering of nothings flung as a tennis ball. Oh, how many times had different sorts of absence-visions excited me – and sometimes disturbed me? The arc of the elastic of a sock above an ankle, two red crescents on the bridge of the nose marking the place of eyeglasses, or the absence that remains white on a suntanned body when a bra is removed.

Practising artists know, or they should know, that with every artwork that they produce, they also lose something from the created world. Builders of a football stadium carve out a large piece of it, like the jewellers who chisel fine necklaces, but does even one of them actually notice that which disappears in the course of their work? Does the robust grandstand reach the calm landscape, which it conceals from the window of someone disabled, or the strand of pearls decorated with diamonds, if it covers the small indentation between the two collarbones, the small concave formation (can we call this an absence?) that my gallant male predecessors once dubbed the “salt-cellar

Upon excavating the volcano-stricken Pompeii, the archaeologists found absences in the form of people of petrified ash. Empty impressions of the disintegrated victims of the catastrophe. As the negative form is the warning presence of loss, it is always more tragic than the positive, and the excavators could not even bear to look for long, filling the anthropomorphic cavities with plaster, thus resurrecting the Pompeiian inhabitants as lifelike sculptures. Did they even ruminate on what these citizens beaten by fate might have desired more? To remain spiritual forms of absence as mementos, or to afford solace to the tourists in a sculpture park exposed to the public: death is that which always happens to others. 

“Upon a branch of nothingness my heart sits trembling voicelessly” – we read in the most tragic lines of Attila József, and how unusual is the force of the poetic image: we can see, or at least we believe we see the evidently invisible. Upon reading another poem, Consciousness, the notions of existing and non-existing are likewise fixed in the imagination as an objectified, sensory vision: “Only unbeing can branch and feather, / only becoming blooms at all; / what is must break, or fade, or wither.” When I began to draw my Absence pictures, I thought of just this emptiness, virtual nothingness appearing in the imagination, and I wanted to depict the negative moulds of reality, the Void that invisibly embraced them.

I chose edifices and architectural details with which, alongside their responses to the negative-positive form, I could draw the viewer with me into some past epoch, into the historical network of the association of ideas. The embeddedness of cultural history, and the artificial break that occurs from there, their characteristic components of content, and the associative relations of the formal-geometric gesture can shade the image in such manifold ways, that even I would not be able to follow every thread. And of course, I would not even like to. If I could have one wish in connection with my own visual artwork, then first and foremost I would ask for my pictures to begin to live an autonomous life, and for content to be found in them that I never would have even thought of. Each of them should meet in the zone concealed behind the frame and the pass-partout, they should respond to one another, and I should not understand their dialogues better than anyone else.
Ancient Rome appears in many of my pictures, with the first pieces of my Absence-series also reflecting the Eternal City. A triumphal arch, an aqueduct, a colonnade headed with tympanum, and of course, the cupola of the Pantheon. More precisely, in all these edifices, absence is drafted, elaborated and rendered visible. Spectacular nothingness. The yawning, enormous aperture on the summit of the cupola, in the place of the oculus the suspended massive stone disk. Worn down, decayed, a thousand years old. Would it be possible to find a more sensory form – an elevator – toward the descent into the past? Or to the break from dimensions? How could I have experienced the paradox of the black hole, if I had not stood there day after day, my vertebrae stiffening, beneath the disk of the falling night, imagining, perhaps even awaiting the embrace of inverted gravitation of accentuated times. I learned that the material density of the celestial bodies called black holes approaches infinity, expanding toward the zero. That is the point at which absolute Nothingness reigns. I learned this, but I can only imagine Nothingness if I can depict it. I draw the negative of nothing. I say, this is something, this is – the inverse of – nothing.

Ágnes Nemes Nagy, in analysing the emptinesses in Attila József’s string of verse, Consciousness, employs a surprising architectural comparison to explain the absences between the words, lines and stanzas. “The poet… extends the pauses between the stanzas to be as airy as possible, like a broad colonnade. But who would be able to recite the spaces between verse of colonnade proportions? In order to use the space between the columns, we must still carve out the columns. While the poem is written more or less for the spaces between the lines, the lines themselves must be written as well.” When this analysis of poetry found its way to me, I had already completed my work, had already printed my engravings, and still I had the feeling that Nemes Nagy had wanted to come to my aid, or rather as if she had designated a task beyond time – and death – for me. And I thank her. With the exception of a brief conversation, I never had a relationship to her, and I barely knew her personally; nevertheless, that geometric attitude elevated to poetry, which stands closest in connection with her name, was extremely determining for me. “Art is one projection of the comprehension of the world, and it is just perhaps especially an geometric projection.” I learned also this sentence from her, from her essay entitled The Geometry of Verse. And from whom else could she have taken this?: even now, she strolls at the side of Plato, this inscription above their heads: “No one should enter, who is not familiar with geometry.”

HERMITAGE 250

Past Post exhibition dedicated to the 250th ​A​nniversary of the State Hermitage Museum.

53 artists from 15 countries were invited to participate in the exhibition of the XXI Century Foundation of the Hermitage. Dates: 07.12.2014 - 18.01.2015. Participants: Per Arnoldi Ewa Bajek-Wein  Pierre Bernard, Stephan Bundi (alias Etienne Bonjour), Ivan Chermayeff , Seymour Chwast Cyan (Detlef Fiedler, Daniela Haufe), Homa Delvaray Krzysztof Ducki, Zenji Funabashi, Alexandr Guelman, Milton Glaser, Igor Gurovich, Anatoly Gusev, Jianping He, Mervyn Kurlansky, Elena KItaeva, Sergey Kuzhavskiy, Laboratoires CCCP = Dr. Peche + Melle, Alain Le Quernec Uwe Loesch, Andrey Logvin, Keizo Matsui, Shin Matsunaga, Holger Matthies,, M/M (Paris) (Mathias Augustyniak, Michaël Amzalag and others), Karel Mišek, Piotr Mlodozeniec, Kazumasha Nagai, István Orosz, Kari Piippo, Gunter Rambow, Makoto Saito, Andrey Shelyutto, Leonardo Sonnoli, Boris Trofimov, Annik Troxler, Niklaus Troxler, Paula Troxler, Vladimir Tsesler, Rambod Vala, Hamid Vasfi, Jukka Veistola

COLUMNS

At first glance at István Orosz’s 2001 etching, entitled Columns III, our initial emotional response might be to think that we are witness to some sort of new-Renaissance revival: relics evoking the beauty and greatness of Antiquity, and majestic remains of ancient edifices that once stood, now in ruins, appear again in these pictures. And then making a more thorough survey of the pillar-column ensemble enclosed by a complicated architrave with ornamental Corinthian capitals, ascending in tiers, precisely demarcated (and thus contrary to its ruinous nature), in a wild, overgrown milieu, we stumble upon visual phenomena that are strange and difficult to decipher or interpret, as we scan the accentuated, dictated vertical axis of the artwork. Commencing our gaze from below, we are compelled to recognise that the two pillars standing on a quadratic pedestal and commencing rectangularly, are transformed imperceptibly into columns while ascending – and certainly playing an important role in this is the fluting of the pillars-columns into nothingness, and the capricious emergence of azure bands stretching between them – and in the course of this evolution, the two pillars will become three columns in a mysterious way, while the forms projecting frontally from the plane of the base into the upper realms, are transformed into a heavy and painfully unfinished architectronic conclusion, also taking possession of the space in its depth. (To monitor, starting from above, we are compelled to experience inversely the exact same phenomenon raised to appearances – but use of the concept “appearance” here is suggested to be contingent and qualified.) Attempting to dispel our doubts and to clear questions that have arisen, we can formulate our suspicion that the visual illusionisms generated by the transitions, and sparklings are blurred, re-coloured, kept in incertitude, and things are dispersed into presentiments.

Things that are naturally not of architectonic character, but raised to metaphoric heights and of a mental nature. In the central space of spirit-mirror-image, refined confusion is rekindled (the essence of art is error and misunderstanding), which then imperceptibly takes the upper hand over the entire portrayal, extending doubt and shutting out formulas and unambiguity. Paradoxes and contradictions, however, create a kind of balance, and we do not find logical responses to this harmonious junction, to this harmony that can be synthesised in playfulness: according to our conventions of so-called reality, it cannot be equivalent to appearance, even if appearance is equivalent to non-reality. But if we get beyond the laying out of this seemingly important conclusion, then we finally are confronted with the essential problem: what can we do with so-called reality, which is not only a semblance, but really apparently that?

(Tibor Wehner)

CUPOLA

For my part, Istvan’s “reverse” dome is like the Hungarian poet’s, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, veil as the metaphor for Rachel: the opposition of the tightly and the loosely woven verses are explained by the heavy wafers of gold on a translucent fabric. In both, there are at the same time some weightiness and gravity, and also some airiness in the background of the former. (However, “background” is not the most correct term in the respect of such works of art). Depending on whom I identify myself with on the etching, the discovery starts. My attention first falls upon that massive one among the human artefacts (a down-to-earth person for sure) which – paradoxically – is floating here. The lately visited miraculous Newgrange Sacred Site comes into my mind: through the boulder-like stones, the light comes in as it does in the picture, too. And I also think of Stonehenge: rocks of thousand pounds arranged with astronomical and scientific accuracy. These are the crumbling blocks of prehistoric times covered with grass and ivy. My natural fear of height is likely to develop: I can hardly look up into a dome, the man-made space weighs upon me. However, the aspect changes. Behold! I can notice the constructed in the airy: I invert into inside level and I see the massive stones as shadows. In a moment, the cathedral is built of cloud-marbles, and with some time-travel, you can look through the plate – the oculus of the Pantheon – onto the night sky. This huge hole – abusing the viewer’s liberty – is to be stopped for example on a… sock. On my dome darning-egg – carefully turning the inside out – you can repair it by all means.

(Andrea Orosz)