(Opening speech of a poster exhibition)I am not at all surprised that I should give a short speech here. It is the normal way of the opening of an exhibition. But I hope you see the paradox idea in it: we are to communicate the visual orally. To be honest, it is not ‘comme il faut’. And to be more honest, it makes no sense. And I also should apologize for not being the man of words.
Of course not only the possibility but the fairness to discuss the works of the exposition and of graphic design on the whole is questioned now. We always tell the students of visual communication that they should be able to express themselves through different kinds of media, they should tell the message and also interpret it. However, life is different. I always find it very suspicious if I should explain to my employers what my works mean, how they should see or interpret them. I thought not to be a gentleman when giving the interpretation of something that can be seen, or I would simply misguide them if it cannot be seen or if they can’t see it, and the meaning I’d like to refer to is only the product of my imagination. And what if only the client cannot see it but hundreds of people can? Keeping on interpreting your work to them is still not moral. You should take it home and work on it or simply give up. For me, my favourite works are the given up. (The only problem is that you can’t make a fortune out of them.)
It was only once that I felt that it is a must, important and it also makes me feel good to talk about pictures, to transform the images, which once I could form on a piece of paper, further into words and also to explain my intentions and to make them clear to the viewers. It took place in a foreign country at the end of the last millennium on a graphic design congress. In a theatre, I had to say some words on me and also to give a lecture and present a slide show on Hungarian posters including mines, too. I tried to give just the basic information on the pictures and almost never referred to what was visible and therefore evident. I gave my speech in English, the audience wore earphones and some interpreter behind the screens translated it into Spanish. After a while, I saw that the audience could not see what I meant. Some took off their phones, asked the others next to them to explain what they saw, to interpret what they heard.
Somewhat later, the interpreter informed me on an embarrassed voice through the speakers that he could not follow me and would like me to return to some of the phrases I used and to explain them to him because he could not see what they referred to. Of course, I agreed on it and also told him to come next to me to the stage, so he could easily notify if something would not be clear. He told me through the speakers that he was coming and some minutes later two men appeared on the stage, they were the interpreter and a man leading him as the interpreter was blind - from the moment he was born, as I later got to know. He had never ever seen. It was easy to see that he could hardly or not at all imagine what I meant by the meaning of illusion, when I was talking about works of mine that have different meanings according to the distance and the angle you look at them. Moreover, there were the anamorphic distortions, the visual paradoxes, “optical hanky-pankies”. 
I had to change my conception on the whole, I shouldn’t apply any of the images in my speech at all. However, my words should have been “visual”. It could not have been very exciting to my actual audience, but he started to enjoy it very much, and – though ashamed of – I also did. I managed to get over the shame you feel if the other person is lacking something you have got, though you do not deserve it. And I didn’t have any moral scruples, as he could not “check” if it is the truth that I am talking about or if I lead him by his nose. 
Of course, I thought I was telling the truth, or – to be honest – when I was not, I did never keep it as a secret. Let’s face the truth: our profession, commercial graphic design is about cheating. The art of “hocus-pocus”. Just consider the following fact: the product you’d like to sell should be presented as something better, more attractive than what in fact it is. No matter whether your product is washing powder, sanitary napkin or a theatre performance or – especially - a political party. Can the graphic designer be forgiven if he notifies you in good time and makes it evident with some visual effect that you have got into the world of illusion, if he acts the way the famous Hungarian illusionist did and says right at the beginning that “watch my hands, because I’m cheating”?
Let me take the risk of giving another statement on whether words have anything to do with those fields of art whose materials are other than words. As a layman, I’m absolutely aware of the fact that my statement is not at all strong and easy to attack. It was taught that works of art means the unity of ‘content’ and ‘form’. So, it is only ‘content’ that you can transform into words. Their more “important” part, their ‘form’ can never be interpreted like that. Our clearest art, the art of music has only form, therefore, it can never be told. You are able to understand, feel, be passionate about, die for it, but are unable to translate it. If we accept that convergences do exist among the arts – just to avoid the idea of development – I believe in the progress of a kind of abstraction to music forms.
But we went too far. So, it is the connection between words and visual communication that I wanted to dedicate this opening of the exhibition to. I used to had a workshop for young poster-designers in the same country where I met the blind interpreter, and I wanted them to work according to the following phases: first, put into words what your posters are going to be about, that is, the ‘message’. You can also write it down. After this, read these words through once, twice, three times, four times, etc. You will see that there are words, even sentences that you don’t need. Delete them. Reading them through more times, you’ll still find words or phrases that can be deleted. “Minimize and reduce”. And when you won’t need any of the words, of the letters even, can tell that you are ready with your poster.
(Despite of my adventures with the interpreter, I still believe that a good work is not in need of words. This exhibition is neither in one. So please, forgive me for talking so much.)
Some years ago, I was asked to design a poster for the jubilee 20th Poster Biennial in Warsaw – Posters are said to be the art of “here and now”. I wanted to describe this relationship in that poster. 
I am searching for a time, but in vain; yet it would have been good to find it, so that I don’t have to cite by heart the story, the often-quoted tale in which the painter puts down his brush, steps into the landscape, sets off among the bushes of the freshly painted picture, on one of the meandering trails into the distance, and disappears into the dusk setting over the garden, or is swallowed by the fog enveloping the labyrinth. The aerial perspective – as the jargon has it. He is lost before our external eye, but of course the internal eyes follow, since there within us he continues to stroll on; lost, or simply not found for an eternity. He promenades in the labyrinth that is transformed into cerebral furrows. It is not even necessary to take great pains to readjust the form: it is easy to see a labyrinth in the convoluted coil of the Moebius-strip of grey matter. There he roams; the wind subsides about him, and the birds fade away, as suits the nature of already drawn pictures. 
In a word, I would begin with the tale of the painter lost in his own picture, though the original has to be found in the precise quotation: needle in a haystack. Searching through the bookshelf is doomed to hopelessness, since the cardinal leading principle goes like this: “there is still a space large enough to accommodate the selected third volume of Borges”. Something like this has a greater chance of emerging from the drawer for bed linens, or from behind the refrigerator. I could say that we live on a gallows; in fact, I will say it, because it will come naturally to my writing on labyrinths. In a word, a place of loss. Please, just read (because we have nevertheless returned somehow to the bookshelf) the section of approximately a half-metre of spines: Kafka, Tamás Morus, Joyce, Santarcangeli, M. C. Escher, Umberto Eco, Szentkuthy, the Odyssy and another Borges. As it happens, exactly that which contains The Garden of Forking Paths, as well as The Book of Sand, in both of which it is just as possible to get lost between the letters as in a veritable labyrinth. 
The garden is eternal nostalgia. It is a summons of the desired world, and a resurrection of Paradise. The order presumably designed in Creation also casts its imagination onto the Garden of Eden, and this is why then, alongside natural forces, the laws also appear. The geometric networks are projected onto the garden, and the labyrinth takes form. Accompanying myths, religions and rituals, it is one of the most ancient motifs. As far as desire for order is logical, just as human is the wish for freedom, which often precisely in return for order, manifests itself as the contrast of geometric, symbolic and allegorical representations of order. 
The enigmatic point of the labyrinth is the crossroad, and the constraint to choose that appears at the intersection: this is the blessed and cursed emblem of man who yearns for freedom, and who is condemned to freedom. The possibility of going astray, the knowledge that at any time, we may decide in error: this renders the wandering in the labyrinth at once beautiful and desperate. The enter through the gate of the labyrinth means simply to step out of time, to break away from the world, to accept solitude and to surrender ourselves to the unknown forces of destiny. To its severity or its benevolence. But to err in the labyrinth is both a cultural lesson and an intellectual adventure. S/he who undertakes it can feel s/he winds Ariadne’s thread together with Plato and Dante, with the cathedral-building Freemasons, and with Piranesi, Gaudí and Picasso. 
The most beautiful garden experiences are related to Italy: in Tivoli the Villa d’Este Gardens, Prince Orsini’s garden in Bomarzo, or that of the Pitti Palace in Florence: the Boboli. It is not difficult to recognise that these gardens exist also within time: the trees grow with broad spreading branches, ivy runs along the walls, the fountains are overgrown with pond scum and the statues with moss. It is to no avail that I see them in their youth as projected onto the monitor of my imagination; the romanticism of fallible, ancient gardens is more fascinating. Kicking at the forest litter, I hum with Csokonai (Mihály Csokonai Vitéz: “To Solitude”): “Delight in such a place to roam / And for a poet to feel at home”. And for my type of draughtsman. The beautiful Baroque gardens blur with the gardens of my childhood: the promenade in Kecskemét with the tramping of football, the oak forest in Szepezd with the rustling of the wings of stag-beetles, and of course, the park on Hargita Street, where the densest, most velvety nights seeped from the boughs of elderberry. I know that it is not easy to convince that these gardens are in my drawings; yet, I would even swear upon it. They are all there, separately and simultaneously. The gardens, or at least the aberrations and solitudes learned from them. Their invisibility corroborates them. And the secrerts with which they entrusted me. The face of Happy Botany. The ancient verse, which I invoked above is painfully true: the fountain, the angel, and perhaps I am also real in it: 
