Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

LAJOS SZAKOLCZAY

Harbor

Notes past midnight

The Christian Museum in Esztergom, home of so many great works of art, also gives place to temporary exhibitions in its first floor halls. I don't know whether artists must earn - by living up to the spirit of the museum and its exhibited material - their place among the time-honored walls. If the answer is yes, then Krisztina Kókay, a textile artist also excelling in graphic art, has earned it twice. Firstly, because she is a native of Esztergom and this town means more to her than to one born in any other place, and secondly and probably more importantly, because of the inner fire of her works,

the cleansing meditation that is almost a religious rite.

Her textiles - the woven tapestries and painted canvases - and her graphic works - the pencil drawings and copperplates - are all characterized by the active silence of contemplation. The ornamental elaboration, the masterfully worked surfaces and a sense of concealment that goes beyond mere prudence, would be reason enough for us to think so, since the lurking silence of the works gives them a strange purity. But the growing of the silence is even more exciting as a soul, given to meditation and, spellbound by the towers and domes, turning more and more into itself, projects its experiences - Renaissance joie de vivre and the pain of the Way of the Cross - upon its artistic environment, upon the abstracted landscapes that almost invariably represent masses of emotions, upon the heavily silent stones, and upon the moments of emotional and sensual self-revelation that often turn into the dramatic from the lyric.

Three large-sized painted canvases, And how can the tower stand it, what are the bells ringing for Him... (1994) with its teasingly poetic title, Resurrection (1992) and That which helps to survive (1992), make us realize that Krisztina Kókay's poetic geometry, although built on abstraction, is full of emotional charge. The two latter textile pictures show clearly that the sacred and the profane, Biblical inspiration and open eroticism (the best example of which is the pair of entwined, almost merging "rock bodies") get on well together. Poetry, the density of the network of lines, hides and at the same time emphasizes the two poles.

j|