Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

a psychiatrist is searching among the signs, fine as threads, for herself, for the solution to her own creatures, for the explanation to herself, and she is the first one to get alarmed when she understands how much she could grasp of what cannot be grasped, how much she could draw of what cannot be told. There's a holy bird perching on her shoulder, the immense responsibility of art. Re-introducing herself to us at this present exhibition, she is appearing with something new once again: her confession is tighter, more enigmatic, with a changed perception of depth, which results in the deepening of the drawings. What her technique adds to the usual methods surprises us with its creative psychology. Artists normally take a fixed starting point and descend from there into the depths of creation, into the folds of terror and loneliness, to finally come ashore. Krisztina Kókay's art retraces these steps on tapestries, gobelins and graphic works, bringing back the end instead of the beginning of creation. What you see is the result, which needs reverse engineering to reveal what started it, what took it to the point it reached, what was

the holy seed of this outcome. The artist portrays the yield of the tree, and if we understand her signals we might reach the ground, we might reach the blessed secret of her mind, which has been rubbed, till blood came, by some experience, hurt, scare, fever or revelation in her soul. As I have said, textile is a message from the monasteries, the art of this artist is a living confession, fragmented, projected at an almost inimitable angle, self-tormenting and elevating, a fragrance, but from the soul of the tree, a rainbow, but black in color, and not only our own suppressed confession of ourselves. Everything we are unable to say, everything that makes this world our world by the presence or lack of our cognizance of it, she projects from the very soul of the soul. Let's not ask her what it cost her to be able to present to us this beautifully tormenting and enchantingly skillful exhibition material. Let's just thank Kókay Krisztina for it. Listen to the life confession entrusted to these pictures; and with that request I declare the exhibition open.

OPENING SPEECH, VIGADÓ GALLERY, BUDAPEST, 12 JUNE, 1997