Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

and concealment. It evokes a secret, the enigma of existence that is the property of all things living, but which no one can explain. The large canvases are from a drawn pictorial world, but there are transpositions that transfer these fine signals into symbols. They project mostly onto walls. The walls are never real. They are immaterial and floating. They always display a rift. It may be a fine crask or an actual gate, caved in a little window, the gateway to another world. A world not seen only sensed. Present all at once are the blue of forgiveness, the beast devouring anew princess every night, the magic horse flying over seven globes in one swooping stride, and other never really comprehended props of mythic consciousness. It is all very mysterious, and still, the seemingly familiar things of the world on this side of the beyond are no more than that. All the while they may rest on misunderstandings no end. There is just one certainty; the wall that divides. It divides just as it connects. Like the wall of a cell that makes life itself possible by being partially passable. The wall stands between one entry and another, between inside and outside, past and present, civilization and its fall, remembrance and forgetting. It evokes intricate patterns of rough-hewn chunks of stone in the Mycenean labyrinth, or the smoke-covered, unrestored mosaic firmament in the early-Christian chapel at Ravenna, the cracked, dried-out ground, the face of the Indian Earth-God, the crammed rows of corns on the cob, or the honeycomb-like cells of a living body. The effect is a vibration between extremes. At first its seems monumental, but really it lives in the finest details. It alludes to permanence rooted in myths while radiating the corruptible transience of childhood drawings etched into the sand.

The image recalls the viewer into the landscapes of genesis, evoking visions everyone many times a day nourishes in dreams, remembrances and the imagination. But now he may feel that he confronts them for the first time on paper, on canvas, or on silk.

OPENING SPEECH, DOROTTYA STREET GALLERY, BUDAPEST, 8 JULY, 1992