Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
JÁNOS OLÁH Drawing and textile A vulnerable and insecure personality has always had to muster a degree of audacity to express himself as an artist. Audacity is a dubious term when referring to Krisztina Kókay. She accepts the risks involved in making a drastically personal statement with quiet resignation and natural serenity. The directness with which she expresses and conveys the fusing between her internal qualities and artistic possibilities is galvanizing. Which is perhaps why drawing is so important to her. It is not a tool of depiction or portrayal but a direct account of her internal state. Her drawings are reminiscent of electrocardiograms, not just visually but in their essence. Everything is stated in the simplest expression, though with a resonant line. Gossamer and lyrical, her drawing is averse to any stated creed, nothing is transposed or depicted, there is no ideology or lure art theory. It does not want to be except what it is. Drawing is the most personal sphere of art, a genre comparable to the literary diary. The visual diary comprising these drawings deflects its light back on the artist who made it, through a multiple spectrum which yet is void of stylistic alteration. The viewer appears to step into what seems at first a forthright world. A line reflecting insecurity yet a generous sweep of the hand, the power of the touch and gentility of tone, and the whiteness of the paper. Nothing more. Their balance and the loss of it gives birth to the motifs, fine internal lines like the ripples in silk or netting or the surface of the water, tangled webs borne on a breath of wind. The surfaces are familiar from that moment between two feelings or two actions. Those feelings once expressed, those actions once executed, shatter the surfaces. They know nothing about abstract and composed order, just as the visual world with its set of own rules is alien to them. The shading and the left-out whiteness of the paper are only supplementary tools; the drawings' spirit is the line with its vulnerability and irregularity, the evocation of a silent drama of defenselessness come out of expression Sr**- ■ til
