Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
MÁTYÁS DOMOKOS "You cannot change" A foreword to Krisztina Kókay's exhibition in Esztergom One master of my youth, László Németh, was fond of saying and also put into writing several times that artistic talent needs the quiet and fertile obscurity of anonymity to be able to mature undisturbed. Words of gold, proven by several examples in the history of arts. On the other hand, a series of 20th century artists' lives warns us that it does no good if this quiet, of anonymity or of involuntary seclusion, takes too long, if the obscurity is dispersed too late because the meeting with the inner circles of the profession and with that receptive environment we usually call "the general public" happens too late or too infrequently - as we may gather from the overview of Krisztina Kókay's career in the catalogue. Visual artists are especially vulnerable to such a tardiness, since their loneliness and isolation is of a greater order of magnitude, deeper and more hopeless, if you like, than that of the men of words, of writers. The picture, the sculpture, the gobelin, the drawing exists in only one lonely copy in the solitude, silence and dimness of a studio, disturbed only by the occasional friend of the artist, while the book, even if unread, has at least a thousand copies. Then someone comes along and stands between you and the pictures as an unauthorized, though, hopefully, bona fide opener of the exhibition, lacking both the expertise and the proper profession to do so. What could I say from the viewpoint of the amateur viewer of pictures and as one who didn't have the chance before to meet Krisztina Kókay's art about this exhibition material? The catalogue calls Krisztina Kókay a "textile artist", but I confess I can do nothing with this professional definition, it has no meaning for me. What I see is not "textile art" but drawings realized on paper, silk or other materials, which make visible a strange paradox, captivating for me, the amateur viewer of pictures. Their existence is justified not by the expectation that they would somehow incite an association of ideas as if they were noble "artistic" relatives of the enigmatic inkspots of the Rorschach test, but by representing "exactly and finely", following the meaning of Attila József, with the simplicity of certainty some objective inner principle, which is the - organizer? structure? or function graph? - of those states of mind of ours that seem impossible to grasp, to penetrate, to express any other way: of that plasma state of the soul that Bergson, a philosopher of our century, calls the "duration", and which slips out of the net of conceptual definitions and abstractions, but which still cannot exist outside the order of certain structures and lines of forces, independent even from us in a sense, within us and without us at the same time, like ideas or archetypal images. The potential between two mutually exclusive yet interdependent poles give birth and nourishment, I think, to Krisztina Kókay's so-called "line drawings", her expressive abstractions related in drawing on paper, silk and textile in order to capture and record the inconceivable and the inexpressible. For example, the mysterious triplicity of the present and the future of the past, to refer to one of her pictures, which has for its most mysterious phenomenon in its "duration" transition itself: the flow of the past, vanished into nothingness but still very real, through the reservoir of the prevailing present into the future. The homogeneity and the three different characters of time, which is separated and united at the same time in our perception and consciousness.
