CHEVALIER LAMARCK

An old drawing from a new book. He is Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck the French naturalist (I etched him for Marlena many years ago) and the book is The Art of Deception edited by Brad Honeycutt. I received it yesterday from Imagine Publishing.

THE LIBRARY

Orosz’s unassuming title “The Library” gives no hint of this print’s Escheresque themes of duality, metamorphosis, dimension, and impossible structures.  As we gaze upward at the ivy-encrusted walls surrounding the Gothic window, we think “yes, a typical old library.”  But as our gaze sweeps downwards, those outer ivy walls seamlessly metamorphose into the library’s interior, and that window, closed a moment ago, has opened into the book-filled room.  Where does “out” end, where does “in” begin?  Where does stone pillar become wooden window frame?  Gazing too long at the center of the print can produce vertigo—our brain can’t decide which way to interpret that window, and flits back and forth in its perception. The library visitor (Orosz), momentarily paused in his reading to reflect, stands on a parquet floor that rises up to become a pile of cubes. The propped sketch of a hypercube hints at this play with dimension—when does two-dimensional become three (or four)? Other impossibilities lie about—a Leonardo-like dodecahedron with impossible connections, a scrap drawing of a Penrose triangle beckoning us to discover that same triangle in the window, working its magic transformation.   And yet all of this is a library, Orosz’s own library, the spines of books inscribed with names of artists, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, philosophers, and others from whom he draws his inspiration. What will his musings produce next?

(Doris Schattschneider) 

THE WALL

A peculiar Moebius strip hovers seriously in the milk-white nothingness. The mass of robust, ancient, presumedly the Roman ruins of a gate, relatively intact Corinthian columns, parapet fragments, bare brick and stone walls, and walled-up arches winding in zigzags swims in the great whiteness, and with its artful engagement that is impossible in reality, it issues the well-known horizontal-eight form of “infinity”. Infinite in its infinity. A profoundly philosophical work. Here there is no background, no ground, origin, nature, man, animal, plant – there is no life anywhere. Perhaps we are in 3000, or 10,000 AD, by the time that this is all that remains of all of human culture in space: the remains of the wall that have absorbed these victories, defeats, sweats, blood, happiness and pain alike, capitals evoking vegetal runners...
Light and shadow, the perfect drawing here has been arranged on this sheet in the interest of a higher aim: to name the unnameable, to portray the unportrayable, to express the inexpressible, to divine the indivinable.

(György Kemény)

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)

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)

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)