Lajos Sváby: Images with consolation

in: Műértő 2009. November

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Art has been in the public interest for thousands of years. By making the phenomena clear, art displayed the laws, the gods. Even though art has always felt the complexity and multiplicity of human existence, art creates order in the world by making events straight. People always wanted to live in an understandable continuum of time and understand life. Although we experience the dualism of phenomena and things, the two-facedness that has always only fallen on our feet and still falls today, we cannot get rid of our insoluble contradictions, yet we seek one-time answers and solutions. In us and in the world, good and evil chase each other. And we are afraid, terrified, like children.

Kosztolányi writes, in the Complaints of the poor child:

 

If the shadow came and if it grew above my heart,
I hid in a corner of the room.
And the whole earth shook.

 

A metaphor, if we take it apart, only incomprehensible concepts, words will remain in our hands, a little boy will hide somewhere for fear, and until then the whole earth will tremble. Pictures and paintings cannot be understood or explained. Sights, memories, dreams and thoughts explode into each other in the pictures as well. In the pictures we can admire the ensemble of spiritual sets. The observer must not disassemble, but must put together what he sees, as the painter does.

In one of Márton Szabó's paintings he has a self-portrait with the ears of a huge Mickey mouse. Locked in a glowing globe in his hands, he holds a panting, howling tiny child. As long as we live, we will all do that. We hold in our own hands, cherish ourselves, that poor little child who wants to exist, to live. Mickey Mouse is our hero, he is the cunning Odysseus. Mickey Mouse is the modern embodiment of our myths, but he is also a parody of the hero, as he can only laugh at his victories.

 

In Márton Szabó's paintings, the boundaries of everyday life and poetry blur. He has a picture of an artificial foot on the front left against a railing. Everything behind it lives and throbs. The lights shine cheerfully in the blue water of the swimming pool. A woman comes out of the water. An ordinary scene, which is not made special by the artificial foot either, as due to the natural serenity of the picture and the calm sight of the woman, our eyes do not look for the person belonging to the artificial foot. Deep water is inscribed in red letters and this unpainted white spot forces me to look almost squinting in the middle. Because of this, my eyes don’t wander and I see the whole picture in its entirety. Because of this, the presence of misery also seems natural. The obviousness of the picture becomes true, spectacular, and thus the everyday life becomes poetic. Only real artists can do this. Márton Szabó uses the ancient tools and solutions of painting, yet he is intensely about his time, our time, our present, and he paints his paintings. In his other paintings, we are guided by the never-boring obviousness and sensation of perspective. He always deals with living and natural things. Face of a terrified little boy in close-up. I want to caress him from the sight of his light-startled eyes. But who? What? After all, he's just paint and canvas. But it encourages consolation. It reminds me of consolation. Children’s toys, puppets in the foreground grow, rise, and give my eyes direction on how relative things are. Behind the insignificance, backwards. life takes place, the flower blooms. There is a little boy in the garden, a red carpet on the dust, everything is simple, but an orange spot lights up at the top of the picture, which, due to its ignorance, still suggests something. Blinking sharply, it says, Watch out!

In another picture, also according to the banal rules of perspective, an elderly woman is nestled on her hospital bed behind a little girl’s face closest to our eyes. The little girl's melancholy gaze and the woman seem to be one. Childhood and old age. I believe in seeing that the trouble is over and hope is born.

Márton Szabó uses coarsely woven canvases, as if life is the texture of his paintings. When I was in his studio, I saw his motives and his tools. Her main model, the faded old toy doll, Ubul, was orchestrated on the windowsill, and next to it was the notched tin can used as a pedestal. Junk little found objects, as they say today, object trouvé, reminiscent of everyday existence and to reconcile with the panting, weeping poor little child who we were, and who, when he fears in the corner of the room in fear, then the whole earth trembled.

In this exhibition, we can see mature and clear-speaking paintings of a real painter.