“I have been asking myself ever since, is the path of man a building or a road? If it’s a building, then it’s a pretty shoddy one. If it’s a road, then maybe I still have a chance”, ponders Ákos Birkás in a 2006 interview with Edit Sasvári (“Construction or Road? Conversation with Ákos Birkás, Ákos Birkás, Művek/Works, LUMU 2006.)

One of Birkás’s very appealing traits is his often self-deprecating sincerity. Sometimes I feel that there is a programmatic quality to this, stemming from a certain air of pseudo modesty. The dropped sentences of an established artist who sits on the rafters without a spasmodic grip. But the citation raises a very important question, which is really about whether the painter is going down the technocratic or the existentialist path so stubbornly entrenched? There is no need to introduce the Existentialist, since the 19th and 20th centuries are full of them, whose groaning turns and tortured periods were still shaped by the subject’s dictates or by historical cataclysms and political turns. The mammoth life’s works were therefore credited with a sense of fate. No one today demands that. The technocrat seeks a viable brand in the face of the fickle inspirations of outdated ideals. The focus has shifted from the artist to the work, which is nothing more than the product of a well-constructed industrial machine, with an operating theatre and skilled puppets. This product can of course be the artist himself, if he is consistent enough. Almost anyone can build a life’s work, given the predetermined coordinates and the needs, if they know the rules and are talented enough.

Of course, it is not a question of whether Birkás was talented enough and had worked his way through the witch’s kitchen of the art factory, but whether he ever got to grips with the success of the life’s work that could be built. His generation and his moral constitution also left him halfway between the existentialist and the technocratic type of artist. The exciting diversity of his oeuvre and the trappings of his reports are proof of this. In one of his reflections he even idealizes the aristocratic Károly Ferenczy, in another he talks about the need to paint 12 paintings a year to make a living (Krisztina Dékei: “Dying is rescued financially” – Ákos Birkás painter, Artmagazin 2010/4. 34-37.). I have the feeling more and more that Birkás, however conscious and self-reflexive, is actually walking a path, not putting together a building. He is walking the meandering path of the architect who doesn’t know which foot to stand on: the admiredly successful modernist or the idealistic, self-absorbed and ultimately glorified artist? It would be very unfair to sweep the weight of this decision off the table.

For me, the exhibition in Veszprém was a confirmation in this respect. Birkás insulates the outer walls of the admirably successful modern building. While it is very nice to look at these pictures, I still have a certain sense of romantic disappointment. When can an artist afford to be completely free, if not at the age of seventy-four? And who can afford to do that if not Ákos Birkás?

When I looked around the suspiciously airy rooms of the Csikász Gallery, I had the feeling that Birkás’s qualities and painterly sensibility were only illustrated in a few paintings. The familiar framework themes almost evoked a familiar quality, but I was left with a sense of missingness in many of the pictures. Applied painterly skill, routine solutions, sloppy incompleteness are acceptable in many cases, but not if the artist represents a higher aesthetic agenda. Of course, this program is not officially declared by Birkas (nay!), but its existence is clear to me. The artist’s deep painting culture and his unique valeur sensibility do not allow him to go in any other direction. He could not or did not intend to make a painting that could have functioned without them. That is why Birkás is for me first and foremost an experiential painter. Despite six years of photographing, despite his over-ideologising of periods and turns of events, they remain the juggling acts of an exciting intellect and do not become real concepts. What Birkás does at his best requires neither counterculture nor a theory justifying a B-turn, nor bourgeois Hungary, nor the lack of it, nor an ethnic problem. On the contrary! What has drained the artist’s best paintings is the vacuum of the interested art trade and the gallery world.

Bírkás Ákos, Csikász Gallery,Veszprém, 2015

“It is not only the evocation of old styles that is a step backwards, I am also suspicious of experiential painting based on direct optical observation,” he says in the interview with Edit Sasvári, quoted above. Birkás has always railed against purist painting programmes, but in his best pictures it is this that is the main thing that makes him rage. His figurative turn (2000) coincided with the emergence of the so-called Sensária group, from which he understandably shied away because of its strong conservatism. Despite the strange coincidence in time, Birkás’s work never merged with the puritan creed of the young. Theoretically, l’art pour l’art, or aestheticist painting, always had to be defended. As a programme, it proved too fragile and too little in a century in which art had to paint a sky above the unbroken optimism of social reform, totalitarian dictatorships and scientific and technological progress. Only in the consumerist and populist society of the North American hemisphere has abstract painting been able to fly the flag as a medium of self-expression. In Europe, and especially among left-wing progressives, it was also overloaded with world-changing pathos. The strongest aspect of Birkás is his desire to paint, but to keep it from becoming too boring, credo, he also constantly throws bones to the journos. In fact, as a well-written columnist himself, he even thematises and comments on his own work. The studio work he admires – which, let’s face it, is only appreciated by a narrow group of people – is intended to be incubated by the ever-expanding range of subjects, from the head to Islam, from technocratic everyday life to the softening self-portraits of recent times. They are all exciting propositions and great compositions, but as the example of Veszprém shows, they are only truly functional if they are painted with the piety of workshop work.

I had written this far into the article when I started to get distracted by my own tone. I reread it and was shocked at my dissatisfied insistence. I looked at the pictures again and read through the interviews I could find. What am I demanding of the artist? Is it my own ideals, which I cannot live up to? But it would have been nice to see a great talent together with the lessons of a path that is now almost impassable. I realised I was on the wrong track. That is why it is dangerous for painters to write about painters. I have set up a false system of Pictor Doctus requirements for Birkas, which he resists. He either can’t or won’t comply. But who can stand all this piety and elevated professionalism? Who can afford to pin them on his flagpole like Don Quixote? Who cares about all that if you are not singled out for courage and chased away for cowardice? What is the point of making distinctions within a profession if the whole industry has lost its social weight and importance?

This is something that Birkás, with his more sophisticated erudition, understood much better than his contemporaries, even two generations younger. That art still exists, but artists are gone. The question today is not whether it is sufficient for an artist to paint, or to aestheticise, or whether or not theory is necessary, but whether it is sufficient to be an artist at all. That is why Birkás is fighting against the role of Pictor Doctus. They cannot heal the cultural wound. Those who are merely artists today are not visible. He can hop desperately upwards, but his little finger does not stick out of the inhospitable sea of the armchair scientists. Refusing to sink, Birkás steps onto the stage with his whole personality. He writes, he researches, he comments. He reads, gives lectures and then takes a few stylistic hairpin turns. He produces definitions and juggles his literacy, moves out and comes home. He opens a European window on the Hungarian sky, mixing Central European flavours into the Western menu. Not content with being a professional supplier to the art factory, he doesn’t want to cherish outdated ideologies either. He knows that you don’t have to paint every picture well, it’s enough to prove your knowledge from time to time. He doesn’t want to be stuck in the self-important role of a good painter. He is exciting, unexpected and astonishing, like a public celebrity. In an environment where attention is scarce, he fights not only for himself, but for the industry as a whole. He will not shy away from anything. If necessary, he’ll thrust his naked underbelly in the face of a detached viewer. It’s not enough to just look at Birkás! You have to actually read and listen to him talking. To talk to him and follow him through his twists and turns.

If we only look for the good painter, the great thinker, the consistent brand architect, the Hungarian who is famous abroad, we will be disappointed. With his whole personality, Birkás wants to represent a type of man that used to be called “the man of the intellect”, for which it was enough to be a painter, writer or scientist. Now that these dinosaurs are extinct, we see someone who I hope will manage to save a vial of the old world for the post-climate change era.

Séd – Veszprém Critical Review 2015. issue 4