Imre Tolnay // Warning: Pseudo Art

Opening speech - Csikász Gallery, Veszprém, April 4, 2014.

“I am a poet – what do I care / for the art of poetry as such?” – Attila József, the poet wrote in Ars poeticain 1937 (translated by Michael Beevor). Here is a young painter in the Bakony in the tens of the 21st century, who is interested not only in the art, but also in the essence of the painting, the self-reflection of art, the very doubt that the work and its creator unwittingly create. Ladies and Gentlemen, as to who this painter is, who is sharing his lived-through professional scepticism in several sentences here, that is obviously for you to or can be put together from the fruits of these halls, I would merely be a commentator.

I believe that the issue of the centre-periphery relationship is an important one for our contemporary culture. Barnabas Földesi also builds on this exciting dichotomy: he lives on the periphery, because he is not in a capital city, but at the same time in the heart of a beautiful natural area with a long history, in a small centre. As he says, he has long been interested in peripheral phenomena outside the canon of painting, while consciously and instinctively, consistently building his own inner, autonomous centre. He is suspicious of and disputes, also because of his Christian convictions, the role of art as omnipotent and pathetic, but his works, despite their chamber music dimensions, are fugues and symphonies with a universal message.

Barnabas transcends the now dusty device of bourgeois braggadocio; he is not Marcel Duchamp, out to scandal, for he pins a moustache on his own Mona Lisa when he overlays his own landscapes. He is not so much funny or provocative as ironic, philosophical, reflective. But first let’s look at Barnabás Földesi’s empty, if you like, plain, primitive, unproblematic landscapes painted at first. First of all, let us not forget that the plein air painters, the Barbizon painters, too, fled from academic salon painting to the ‘open air’, to nature, to landscape, to free inspiration. It is also in Ars poetica that Attila József later wrote, somewhat bittersweetly, that “Pure and sweet is the source – bathe in it!” At the same time, landscape has been an expression of deep content and soaring desires and thoughts for centuries, and heroic forces, a sense of freedom, openness and introversion can all be heard in it, can come through its atmosphere. Despite being only a few palms in size, these sounds and resonances strike and resound monumentally through Földesi. And they are very well painted.

The painter’s paintings, which he calls “abstracts”, are obviously to me landscapes in the same way as the ones I have just mentioned, only these are interior landscapes. But they are more than that: they are experimental associations of colour and tone, instinctively constructed layers of imagery. At the same time, they are inverted academicism, consciously striving for image-corruption (not destruction), for the emotional and almost uncontrollable effects of colour contrasts. Stations of colour-dynamic research, similar to that carried out for decades by one of Barnabas’s masters, the Kossuth Prize-winning Ilona Keserü.

In his textual paintings, Barnabás Földesi evokes a critical school while remaining on the borderline of plausibility and credibility. In such post-analyses, the artist, as Barnabás says, is mostly forced to play the role of a helpless puppet or illustration of a theory. Through his written, overwritten works, he disconcerts the observer of the landscape, creates and opens a “safety valve” that releases the psychological burden of the creative sphere. Not only according to Barnabas, but it is almost obvious that in our time the theoretician-curator-critic has almost as much right to shape the artistic canon as the artist himself. Although these systems of expectations and processes were in place somewhat earlier, before the age of Romanticism and liberalism, this is even more the case in our globalised and media-saturated world. I recently read that climate change is also increasing aggression (too) on our planet, it almost directly follows that our cultural-artistic climate and civilisation is also being heated by the heat of virtuality and media. One of the possible creative attitudes towards this is not only the deliberate exclusion, the specific valorisation of the periphery, but also the question of the authenticity of the image – warning!pseudo art

One of the old, peculiar features of art, which was also brought into fashion by Romanticism, is the observation not only from a distance in space but also in time, and even from beyond time. Memoirs, fragments of letters, historical works of art and works intended specifically for posterity are the products of this long-sentimental and serious endeavour. All the while, a quotable, critical, self-ironic manifestation of a pseudo-romantic reverie is the memorial exhibition of a young artist at the height of his powers. Once again, a particularly suspicious view of the immanent artist’s existence from the other side… This will open the exhibition, thank you, but I have also brought something for the memory room, because the Bakony is my Paris, and the artist who commemorates himself is entitled to the happy immanence, the elixir of the mundane / Bakoños Calvados J