Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

It filled me with happiness to be looking at these pictures, because here we can find a heightened sensitivity, the delightful variations of beauty. I have always envied painters for having the most enormous wealth of ways of creating. As an architect, I always have a limit on what I can do, since architecture - just like these pictures - works with abstract forms, but their "field of force" is the most reduced compared to other schools of the visual arts, because gravitation and building physics knock out of their hands the potential that the richest of the visual arts is able to use. The picture has a frame. It squeezes the idea into a small place. The denser, the richer in ideas such

a small place, the more valuable the picture. It is nearly like a command for pictures: put lots in a small place! And these drawings execute the command, to its fullest. They are rich in ideas, they are beautiful, and they have significance for us. True, they are abstract - this is an organic abstraction. The trouble with abstraction is that, as we experience in music, it does not express the feelings behind the pictures fully and directly. If we take a good look at these pictures, we can feel the hidden emotions behind them and the meanings that will take time to ripen in our minds. This experience is like music - like abstract pictures -, not one dimensional, meaning that the precise and correct graduation of time doesn't assert itself in only one direction, but two dimensional, more complex, but of the same richness of expressivity. What stands out in Krisztina Kókay's drawings and these pictures is monu- mentality. Monumentality is a question of proportion: in small sizes, with medium dimensions, you can get to greatness. And from the great - and please regard these pictures now - the characteristic contour forms of meaningful significance are divided by a second layer, which gives order to the beautifully refined structure.

I am sad to see these pictures only in small size. The few carpets hanged here show the potential of these ideas were they to be seen in a greater size. These small graphical works are incredibly monumental. I am saddened by our being so poor and out of patrons of art. It is still true that you can live a rich life though being poor - since it is our inner structure that enriches us - but, together with my fellow art experts and creators, I regret that these graphical works of genius cannot diffuse their goodness in the right size, with full power. As an art connoisseur and contemporary, I have opened Krisztina Kókay's exhibition before those present and excitedly interested with a feeling of endless happiness in my heart, because it is a rare moment and a rare artistic achievement that satisfies both our eyes and our vigilant minds.

OPENING SPEECH, HOTEL FLAMENCO, BUDAPEST, 19 MARCH, 1996