Síkban és térben. Oroján István kiállítása (Gyulai katalógusok 5. Gyula, 1998)

Ibos Éva: Orojan (Fordította: Pató Attila)

Orojan One's fiftieth birthday is but a fact - not a virtue; nevertheless we owe something to the mystery of numbers and some of the numbers prompt us to go back to the past moreover to evaluate all that has happened to us. This is much more true for an artist who has such a sensitive soul as István Oroján. To be sure, all artists are sensitive but in the case of Oroján this sensitivity has some special roots. Art exists above all, knows neither boundaries nor origins. If somebody is an artist then he or she is primarily an artist, and only afterwards a man, and accidentally a Romanian' - as he declared in an interview. This is true concerning its autonomy, although the last phrase bears some more then its apparent significance - from the viewpoint of the individual fate of the artist. 'My otherness quivered and appeared on the picture' - as he said on an other occasion, and both sentences are true. The accent may shift sometimes from this sentence to the other depending on the atmosphere of the given moment. And this, namely this personal atmosphere is influenced by exterior factors whose marks, as a matter of fact, can be detected in a biography, in a course of life. István Oroján was born in a family of Romanian origin at Battonya, a village inhabited mostly by Romanians. He spent his childhood there, then he entered secondary school at Gyula, finally obtained a diploma on graphics and Romanian language and literature at the Teacher Training College in Szeged. One would rather guess that his affection for fine arts developed in one of the centres of education mentioned above - but something different has happened. It was still in Battonya that he had run across a book about Michelangelo which according to him, determined his vocation for a lifetime. Collegium Artium, runned by the University, was regarded by students as the intellectual centre in Szeged. This esteem was guaranteed by invited lecturers, at that time important representatives of the cultural and artistical life, though not recognized by the authorities, such as DezsőKorniss, who presented even some of his works, and even the great scientist, Árpád Mezei, who lives now in the United States, held a lecture there. These meetings had a basic influence on the artistical development of Oroján, because the values represented by the art of Korniss and of the spiritual achievements of Árpád Mezei, serve as the basic foundation for his own artistical attitude and way of creating up to the present day. His master and one of his teachers at the College, László Vinkler is another 11