Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
KATALIN KONDOR Krisztina Kókay's exhibition, opening speech. It is very hard for me to write and speak about your art. Not only because I am not an art critic, naturally I am no such thing, I belong to another profession. But your art defies all categorizing. To evaluate your art is a special task. And it is a task cut out not for an art historian, nor for the person who opens your show, but for the viewer. It has to be done by the visitors of this exhibition. Namely: thinking. Association. A crossword puzzle. It is like seeing a beautiful cloud and dreaming into its shape everything that means anything to one. Or like reading a poem, perhaps only one line of a poem, and getting impressions of images, colors and abstractions - almost inexplicably. Yes, art gets explained only by the needlessly inhibited. All explanations are in vain, and for one who sees with her heart they are not even necessary, because the soul needs encouragement not curing. Which takes me to my point: because you need to be understood, I chose to speak not about your pictures but about you, the person I know. Way back, almost thirty years ago, we were both young, but you already had two kids, a hard-working doctor for a husband, and I admired you very much. Because you carried on your shoulder the all the burden of the two little rascals plus the house work - an artist, need we say, does not do any real work, especially if she is a woman - with an angelic patience on the outside, but with a palpable inner strain day after struggling day, and you seemingly were not there. You had two selves. One was the conscientious mother and wife, the other was the quick-witted artist who rises to invisible heights but lives in inevitable solitude and who knows that this duality is her fate. You, Kriszta, were never there. Or you were always there - and always somewhere else at the same time. This somewhere else is in those spheres that us everyday people can reach only with some help, with the help of art, for example. And just for moments. While you were minding your children, while you were chatting about your husband's working day, your thoughts were also elsewhere. In the clouds. In the castle, the castle of imagination. You were seeking the smell of a lime tree, the Old garden, which existed only in your dreams. You were thinking about holidays that even then weren't a bit like those that live in our dreams. You lingered with lines of poetry, with one line from Petőfi, say, thinking about how you could pour into a picture "Shed on me the light that gathered into your heart from the face of God." I tell you now: you did it, it's in the picture. You were dreaming about bridges that connect us and towers that are apt to fall these days, but yours preferred to lean together even then. Because that is what we would need. Few might have noticed that I had been quoting the titles of your pictures and textiles (dreams, that is) in the previous sentences. Because these are titles, they go "Shed on me the light and the warmth that gathered into your heart from the face of God" and Noah's Ark, and even "And how can the tower stand it, what are the bells ringing for Him" or Holiday, The smell of a lime tree and so on. These are titles, these are what graphic and textile artworks are called. However, your works are more abstracted than could be put into titles. Bridge? This is a title. What should I do if, to me, this picture is more like a sign of an endless celestial pathway, blue like hope itself, and endless like the happiness of flying? Though it's good that there are titles. Because now that I want to break away from your definitions of your pictures, I start thinking that a bridge - for example over a river - does seem to be a celestial pathway, and because it connects two sides, it is hope itself, and because it is high above the water, we are rightly reminded of the happiness of flying.
