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| Marianne Csaky: Bilocation September 30, 2009 - November 30, 2009
In her new series Bilocation, Marianne Csaky works with found images again. The works are based on 5 frames taken from an old celluloid film which was obviously shot somewhere in Europe at a family event. The film depicts spontaneous, unarranged scenes in an intimate(?) and also tense(?) situation. As we all know, spontaneous community gatherings have their specific and well-identifiable spatial dynamics and rituals, just as home movies have their specific aesthetics and visual constructions, by which we instictively locate what we see in time and space. The other layer of the works, the charcoal drawing adds an extra feature to the scenes: a young Korean woman who acts as if she were taking part in the original scene but, at the same time, she still keeps herself outside the scene, at a certain distance. The Asian woman is involved in the original situation as the artist’s alter ego, observes and reacts to what is happening in the pictures. At the same time, her gaze as well as the fact that she is drawn with charcoal, a medium that is different from that of the photo, she is also distanced from the original scene. The characters of the two layers, the photo and the charcoal drawing, look at the same situation from different points of view, I would say, from different places. The visual construction of this work refers to the difference in the interpretations of people who live at different geographic locations and in different cultures. However, the artist uses the notion of personal cultural background as a very personal and complex phenomenon that is not defined automatically and exclusively by a certain geographical location, culture or nationality. At the same time, it refers to the artist as a wanderer, a “homo viator”, using Nicolas Bourriaud’s term, who is continuously on the go, travelling from one place to the other, from one culture to the other, being inside and outside at the same time. This mental and physical state, this form of living adds new aspects to the process of interpreting and re-interpreting and, by this means, it also provides remedy and release from fixed notions and images.
2009-11-03 Eternal longing for Elsewhere Yves Klein Leap into the Void-Fiction about Fiction 9 pictures
Eternal fiction of longing to be away on a fiction in nine pictures
The work itself is the title: Leap into the Void. This is also new, the intended title as a work of art. Without this the work of art would not exist. Compare the title as the work of art – and the work of art as title. 1. Second fiction: deconstruction – de-montage – the creation of reality from metaphor, leap from the metaphysical to the physical. Kelemen uses Photoshop in a different physical environment, to create another newly constructed reality. The resulting photo montage is divided into nine pictures of identical size. The identical sizes of the pictures indicate the equal value of the cut-outs. He transforms the nothingness of the original picture into the nothingness of the unstructured. b. With a new title, nothingness, newly structured through division and manipulation, becomes saved as a metaphor of nothingness. It becomes physical reality through printing and thus attains a new metaphysical dimension. Poetical dimension, the tempting of the impossible. The peasant ploughing in Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus and the asphalt, the cyclist, the house, the sky, the foliage, the tree and the train of the photo-montage, are just as indifferent to the metaphysical ‘event’. The peasant does not recognize it, he does not have to know about it and he does not belong to it. Can he possibly know and does he even want to know? He ploughs, cycles and the train leaves for the next station. Nothing happened, but something happened without him. But in the end what ‘happened’ on this photograph? Nothing. Art was created as an ontological argument. Besides the ‘is’, the ‘should be’. Leap into the Void. Circular shapes float on some of the pictures. Alien things within the picture, born of the imagination. UFOs. For them the cosmic buzz of the material, the ontological humming is the context. They are at home and Klein is at home. Heisenberg has a smile on his face. The pictures are also viewed from their point of view. They longed to get away from somewhere, precisely to this place, into these pictures. They are wandering around here. They have not come to discover anything. Only science is capable of discovery, the imagination only keeps alive the craving for the illusion of the discoverable. Although. I am terrified by the thought, even on the level of the imagination, that something comes, looks at me, does not look at me after all, does not want anything, not even to leave a trace, does not address me. I am not even asked what I want. It moves on. Károly Kelemen, 20.06.2009 2009-05-23 Pastoral Lenke Szilágyi Pastoral Greek: Eidullion = small picture Encyclopaedia: pastoral idyll depicting the life of ordinary people (shephards), a bucolic scene where the idealized terms are treated as real. It's self-evident that the photograph represents objects of reality. I'm there only as an outsider, having no ideals, recording merely the discernible surface, somewhere, some people. Unclouded images with clouds.
2009-03-08 Marianne Csaky: Time Leap 2 Marianne Csaky: Time Leap 2
Time Leap 2 is the title of an exhibition of new works by Marianne Csáky, opened on September 20 at the Me|mo|art Gallery (Balassi Bálint utca 21-23), as part of the Falk Art Fórum staged that day. The exhibition will be on until December 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRvyT11UlI 2008-10-21 Mari and Evike The works of Lorant Mehes and Janos Veto
2007-11-22 From masks into portraits From masks into portraits. Kelemen makes the 19-century South-African masks, now museum objects in the Sprenger Collection, into the inhabitants of a fictive small town (as is well known, the title of Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon alludes to the setting of a brothel in Barcelona’s Avignon Street). So the fictive portrait overwrites the shamanic-transcendent context with that of the citoyen. The reproductions of the masks exhibited at the museum metamorphose into Kelemen’s paintings through multiple visual transformations, and their distinct character simultaneously refers to all three contexts, those of religion, of the museum and of the art history. 2007-02-25 Sándor Radnóti: The Antecedent Image More than once I have had the honor of speaking at openings of exhibitions of Károly Kelemen’s work. I have previously taken the occasion to talk of his works and periods. Now I would like to try a cursory outline of the intellectual outlines and background of his painting. There used to be much debate whether an artist should imitate nature, or rather other artists – respected artists, generally old masters. Winckelmann, for example, mentions in a debate that Bernini “boasted of having thrown off a partiality he had first felt toward the charm of the Medici Venus – a charm which he also, after exhaustive study, discovered in nature.” This is all very well (responds the father of art history), but then “it was this Venus that taught him to discover the beauty in nature, beauty that he had previously thought only to be found in the Venus; without the Venus, he would never have sought it in nature.” This penetrating riposte contains a discovery that would only become obvious over the course of centuries of debate: that works of art (and other images produced by civilization) present cultural schemas that have great influence on the images of nature that we see. Landscape painters seek out “picturesque” views – and what they consider painterly is deeply rooted in the history of painting, just as the portrayal of the female body has been determined by the vision of it as a manifestation of nature. As the domains of culture came gradually to expel the presence of nature, this came to be the place where we go – various languages have their own expressions – we “run” there, “fly” there or, in the peculiar Hungarian version, we are “yanked” there, on excursions. The great majority of images behind the paintings came less and less to be modeled on nature, and more on sights and symbols created by humans. The last great nature painters at the turn of the twentieth century produced the final culmination of a long period of painting with works that are not naïve reproductions of reality, but rather their own constructions. The dramatic changes in the substance and themes of painting were accompanied by a renewed vision of painting’s task: the realistic or idealizing imitations of reality that once seemed so obvious came to be supplanted by an independent development of form per se, leading ultimately to abstraction, and perhaps (as an extreme example) to monochrome painting. The image preceding the painting – once the entire world itself – had shrunk to oblivion. No longer was there an image to serve as the basis for artistic creation. Just as fatal a blow to the representative function of art was an apparently contradictory current that turned objets trouvés into works of art. Here we might be inclined to think that reality itself is being transformed into art at one stroke, but in fact the elimination of surrounding reality is the sure sign of alteration. (Who would urinate into Duchamp’s Fontaine?) Somewhere in between these two directions – the treatment of form in itself, and objects in themselves – we encounter paintings that we may connect to preceding images, like the image of a pipe with an actual pipe. (As long as we ignore the philosopher-painter’s note Ceci nest pas une pipe.) Art made absolute in itself, and the disappearance of “reality” might seem a kind of endpoint, and indeed have seemed such to many. But the image preceding the picture has made a reappearance in many guises, one of the most important being that the images of art history itself – existing works – have taken over the function of antecedent images. Something that has always held a secondary position in the history of painting, like a copy used for study, or to present a picture to a wider audience, or as a variation, or instructive solution or crystallization, or a quotation as homage, and so on – these have always been possibilities, the subject (and purpose) of art within so-called appropriation art. Such connections, previously considered just interesting curiosities, or just currents in the history of artistic influence (like the link between Giorgione’s Fête champêtre in the Louvre, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe , and Picasso’s works that make reference to these), have now become somehow part of the very essence of painting. Winckelmann’s demand that the artist imitate other artists and not nature has become surprisingly apposite after more than two hundred years. Appropriation Art began as a branch of pop and concept art. Among its manifestations were a precise reproduction of a Picasso bearing the title Not Picasso. But as is generally the case with currents fertile in ideas, it came to draw more and more on tradition, and its possibilities expanded. This is where Károly Kelemen enters the picture more than two decades ago. Such an entry naturally gives rise to misunderstandings, or rather logical interpretations that, in retrospect, lead to dead ends or at least backwaters: eclecticism, secondariness, hommage and parody, and the search for correspondences in content or art-historical analogies through the appropriated works, and the like. Today it seems clear that Kelemen always worked with the eddying presence of the antecedent works involved, with the phenomenon of having precedents. Still, there is no trace of historicism in Kelemen’s allusions. It is not the historical (or stylistic-historical) position that he takes up, but rather sights that he considers – and demonstrates – to be largely pre-composed. He shows that a painter’s eye cannot be innocent, even in a cultural-historical sense. The antecedent images are, at the same time, exceptionally variegated, drawing on much more than just the world of art. To take examples from Kelemen’s inventory, the images may come from the media, from everyday life (toys, cards, chocolate eggs, painter’s implements, and the like), from photographs (of artistic enterprises, or documentary images, or portraits like those in the Szondy Test, and others), or from bad art (kitsch, or second-rate tendentious works, and the rest). The composition of the antecedent images comes to accept objects that have nothing to do with them, as well as the converse: motifs pop up outside of the compositions that originally bore them. We have the composition and pose of Picasso’s Ironing Woman of 1904 presented in that artist’s much later Cubist style, while in place of the abject frail figure we get a muscular teddy bear. While Kelemen spent a certain period constantly returning to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (in one picture he combines one figure from that work with the teddy bear and Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire), he restored an art-historical continuity in doing so. To put it another way, he becomes one of Appropriation Art’s tradition-makers, given the well-known fact that a couple of those women bear the outlines of an African mask in Picasso’s possession. At the same time, it is clear that Károly Kelemen has no desire to create any kind of imaginary museum – these are merely quotations in these works. Obviously it is the painter’s express wish to quote the antecedent paintings involved, but at the same time he also sets out to dysfunctionalize them: take, for example an absolute staple of gesture-art, the “disfigurement” of works with an eraser. For Kelemen, these are not gestures of retraction, of doubt-casting – of erasing, in other words – but instead layer the picture like transparencies, creating out of impulses an abstract ornamentation over the apparently-inviolable painting. A good general characterization would classify this painting as the kind that creates expectations out of previously-existing situations, and always serves up surprises – surprises that exhibit a continuity and consistency. The appropriation of the tremendous and heterogeneous store of antecedent pictures has given rise to an oeuvre in practically the traditional sense of the word: recognizable at every turn, and unmistakably indicative of the painter who created them. 2007-01-01 László Najmányi: Hidden Beauty – Sam Havadtoy’s paintings “We may talk about fine art again, without obliged to feel ashamed”, I am telling this to myself, while enjoying Sam Havadtoy’s paintings, at the me/mo/art gallery, in Budapest, Hungary. The exhibit is titled Shibui. The Japanese word means ‘Hidden Beauty’ in English. To hide their wealth, rich people used to wear special robes in ancient Japan. Only the inside of their clothing was richly embroidered with gold tread, the outside of the robes were tailored out of plain, undecorated, simple, fabrics. The paintings on the gallery’s walls are fine and graceful. The artist applies old lace fragments to aluminum sheets, paints them over with elegant hues of pale, complementary colors, before he’d silk-screen ancient ink drawings of Japanese prostitutes on the delicate surfaces. He writes stories, taken from his journal, underneath the layers of plastic glue, lace and paint. We’ll never be able to read these stories, indeed, but their truth radiates through the surface. The mood of the paintings is as of rococo salons. They call the death-fixated music of Mozart and early Ultravox into my mind, and they evoke the peace of funeral shrouds also. Sam Havadtoy, a strangely ageless, elegant man, with disciplined face and manners, came from an old Transylvanian family. He was born in London, England, in 1952. He grew up in Communist Hungary. At the age of 19 he moved first to England and from there to the United States. With an aristocratic, truly European sensitivity in his genes he’s spent 28 years in America. Soon after his arrival to the land of the free and the brave he became a sought-after interior designer, which gave him a chance to get to know the New World’s wealthiest, most influential families, to make friends with some of the most important contemporary artists. Sam Havadtoy did survive New York and now he spends a considerable portion of his time in Hungary. With the pious vocation of ancient monks, with the preponderant self confidence of real rock stars and blessed with the humor of Zen masters he paints, creates mysterious, staggering, enlightening works, which could brighten up any real home. He had a chance to test himself in unfamiliar circumstances and to travel to all the energy-centers of the world: he knows his own abilities and limitations, and humanity’s greatest traditions as well. He knows poverty and also the melancholy of wealth. In spite of his extraordinary fortune and life experiences Sam Havadtoy did not became a saint: designed to seduce the resident Ariel in all of us, his works are filled with refined sensual energy. While playfully erotic, these paintings (or objects rather) are essentially spiritual products. There is no trace of hard labor in them. They look like as if they were created out of the thin air by the touch of a magic wand. Just like thoughts they are immune to gravity. Sam Havadtoy learned the magic of minimalism and repetition from Andy Warhol; he studied the art of subtleness and secret-guarding in the shrines of old Kyoto, and took his cool, easy elegance straight from John Lennon. He collects fragments of old lace passionately. They are slowly decaying proofs to the yearning for beauty of long gone souls of times past. Sam Havadtoy is a highly productive artist, just like Mozart and Warhol were, and similarly to these two of his many masters, he maintains a living contact with popular culture. I am leafing through the catalogues of his earlier exhibits, ‘Legends’ and ‘Love is Hell’. Zsófi Mészáros, the owner of me/mo/art gallery shows me the original works too. The ‘Legends’ series is a homage to the immortals of rock culture: the spirits of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Sam Cookie, Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Queen, The Beach Boys, Bob Marley, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley are evoked by five pointed stars cut in steel, which open to gold leaf covered lace surfaces. These works are contemporary icons, playful prayers to the gods of rock’s new religion. The original five pointed star, which Sam Havadtoy used as a stencil, was found at a flea market, in Budapest, by the artist. Once it was part of a Communist propaganda installation. The clash of Communism and rock and roll was one of the main experiences of Sam Havadtoy’s youth. Under certain light conditions the cut out stars throw a red reflection on the names of rock’s immortals, which are written on gold-leaf covered, old laces. The also lace-based pieces in the series ‘Love is Hell’ are painted in complementary shades of pale pastel colors. There is a word or an _expression stenciled on all of the works: ‘HELL IS BEING SCARED’; ‘ANOTHER LIFE – ANOTHER LIE’; ‘REGRET NOTHING’; ‘I WANT TO BE WHAT I WAS WHEN I WANTED TO BE WHAT I AM’; ‘USED TO LOVE’ and ‘USED’; ‘WRINKLES’; ‘IF TODAY IS TOMORROW’S YESTERDAY’; ‘LOVE IS HELL’; ‘LOVE NEVER DIES’; ‘LOVE IS FOREVER’. The series seems as if it was inspired by a never consumed, life-long, great love affair, a tragic loss, a painful void. “... For the past five years I have been collecting old fragments of lace. I feel a strange affinity with their condition. They were once loved and pampered, held in place of honor. However, as they got old, torn and stained, they became useless and were discarded. Feeling the same way about my life, I wanted to use the lace fragments to express my own uselessness, hoping in the process to restore its beauty and give us both a new lease on life. We are all just fragments of each other”, wrote Sam Havadtoy in the catalogue of the ‘Love is Hell’ series, back in 2002. He’s been living under the spell of old laces for the past decade. He has found old lace to be the very metaphor of his own life. Judging from his words it seems as if he’d think himself nothing more than a product of circumstances, as if he was created entirely by his interactions with his environment. Are we facing a chronic lack of self-respect, or some kind of religious humility in the case of Sam Havadtoy? Judging from the precise execution, intellectual clarity and formal purity of his works, I suspect religious devotion. He believes that transcendence – let it be called truth, reality, beauty, God, Tao, Buddha or Zen – hides in human relationships, in friendships, in mutual respect, in love - in complementary shades of pale. Budapest, June 17, 2006 2006-05-15 |
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Contact person: Mészáros Zsófi
mobile: 06 30 374 1243 e-mail: memoart@memoart.eu 1055 Budapest, Balassi Bálint street 21 -23. 1.floor |