Benedek Csaba – H. Bathó Edit – Gulyás Katalin – Horváth László – Kaposvári Gyöngyi szerk.: Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 14. (2004)

"Non-Objective Painting", Árpád Cselényi's "Ács" Exhibition

canvass. The same "accidental, quasi abruptness" shows up in case of the thinner brush stroke lines. In most cases there is a trapezoid grid cutting horizontal lines vertically. The sequences "Gömöri eklektika" and "Trapéz és korlát" also gain their existence from the interference between coloured forms and lines. However, the artist concedes by using more recognisable motifs and details. The pieces of "Gömöri eklektika" were apparently inspired by the real experienced world. Headboard, millstone, sunflower, bird, motte. The artist did not mean to give concrete titles to his pieces; he did not want to tie the individual experiences attached to concepts. However, his transcripted forms supported by the use of colour can be translated back to the original experience. The painted and scratched grids can also be found here. The lines are sometimes more playful, sometimes more powerful or aggressive, sometimes he has practically carved them in the surface back to the roughstuff. Sometimes the concrete things chastely hide behind grids that act in a curtain-like fashion. Cselényi uses both brushes and painter's knives. In the more pictorial parts, he frequently uses pencil. His brushwork, applying paint and the appearance of colours is quite varied. He splashes, streams different layers of paint on top of each other, and leaves some surfaces translucently empty. In his use of colours he simultaneously applies interfluent valeurs running one into the other and spot-glaze or congruent local colours. He usually builds up his pictures from the bottom layers; it is only with the scratched lines that he gets back to them. His third sequence was inspired by the poem "Trapéz és korlát" (Trapeze and barrier) by János Pilinszky. It is a quadrilateral closed form, four pictures, and four stanzas. They are associative colours and forms conceived from the glamour and durance of memories. He says, "The barrier means being closed. The trapeze is closed as well, but the row of barriers leading into it might solve the closedness of rectangles." There are paint strokes squirting from several directions. There are closed and bending curves - colour running into one another inside and outside the forms. There are configurations looking for each other and edging away. Ambiguities emerge here as well. What's inside and what's outside? How can closed space be opened? Where's freedom and security, inside or outside the closed space? Next to the above-mentioned sequences, the artist brought some new pictures that he had created specifically for this exhibition. The eye that is used to traditional paintings looks for observed similarities in "put-down" forms whether in nature or in artificial reality. In the older sequences the spaces of the pictures operated in the same way, they were all characterised by the expression through lines and colours. But in case of the pictures of 33 windows, there is a determined centre in the space of the picture where objective, explanatory motifs are placed highlighting and clearly expressing the thought around which the composition is organised: "This is what I'm going to talk about". Just like when a narrator sums up the following scene in front of a theatre curtain. The frames of the "picture centre" that inspires the artist's associations enclose female figures, parts of buildings, plants, animals and materialised memories. Some fragments that often come along as dominant forms or are barely observable drawings include atwist ox horns evocating childhood, oak-leaves or female torsos. In his newer pictures, there are a lot of geometric forms, especially square-shaped fields with objects spread out on the enlarged perpendicular lines of the "devised" space. The varied picture spaces in his newest works hint at the fact that he is interested in creating new dimensions. Among them, we can find naive childish-like drawings and renaissance perspectives, decorative quadratic backgrounds painted with clichés, and ones covered with richly coloured texture of paint. He is able to suggest perspective with the horizontal or diagonal strokes of his broad brush. What is more, he can depict movement and thus time as well. The conciliatory or confrontative colours suggest the artist's stream of memories, which seldom reach the surface. The presence and agreement of the artist served as some kind of justification to our contemplations in front of his pieces. Through the pictures, we tried to get into the density of the fields of memories and their emotional and sensorial contents. We attempted to attach associations to visible forms, moving texture of colours, darkening or fading stream of colours. But try as we may, this can only be partial interpretation. There is no intellectual and emotional identity. As the meanings of words are not the same for everybody, the underlying fields are much richer. These symbols are solved in the individual process of interpretation. The linguistic communication is purely in a sign - denotation correlation with the more complex sensual and mental content. As Cselényi's works are just visual signs of what he has survived so far, where his works rooted, and where he gets back picture after picture. 518