Marghescu Mária - Herpai András: Művészet és tér. Miró, Chillida, Tápies, Uecker és kortársaik grafikái. MűvészetMalom, 2013. júnus 8 - szeptember 1. - Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, C. sorozat: Katalógusok 4. (Szentendre, 2013)
Hamvas Béla: A kínai tusrajz
The Chinese ink drawing consists of two elements: one is the black line and blot, the other the empty expanse of white. As long as I saw the drawing like a European, starting out from the black line and blot, and perceived the expanse of white as merely its environment, I understood nothing of it. I thought it depicted some object, or landscape, or scene. In an epiphany I realized that the image did not comprise two forces of equal status. No. The white was not the environment, some passive expanse, an emptiness, nothingness, contingent. No, not all. Rather, it is this that shapes the black (the line and blot), and not vice versa. It is the white that is the shaping force. The space, the nothingness. The indefinable. The infinite. To the European eye all that exists is the black line and blot. That is all the European eye can discern, all that it can regard as being there. The expanse, the space, the white, the nothingness - this it is unable to perceive. Once, in that fortunate moment, I set out not from the black towards the white, but from the white towards the black. That was the moment I understood the Chinese ink drawing. At the same time I understood that although the white is "outside", that the white is the "environment", "space"- in fact, this is what is inside, and that this is the substantive, the personal, the temporal. Everything was contingent on my moving not from the black that can be experienced by the senses into the white, but from the unbounded white into the black. ("The subject is the place whence reality is visible".) I did not position myself in the object but in the shape-forming force, not in the object but into the subject. Not into the real but into the magical. There is no question that modern painting has a kinship with the Chinese ink drawing. It can be faulted only for insisting on setting out from the sensory black, from the object, and regarding the expanse of space as passive and empty. This is still idolatry. It is realism. The object-complex. The backdrop. It is not yet reality. A great painter will be someone who grasps that it is not "something" that shapes nothingness, but nothingness that shapes "something". It will be someone who understands that the white and the emptiness and the expanse and the infinity of the subject is not the outside but the inside, not the real but the magical, not the object but the subject. I am of the view that the time has now come for the birth of such a painter. As long as we discern only the lines and shapes in the image, we can see only half the image. As indeed the European picture is only the exterior half of the real picture. As long as we are unable to grasp that the white emptiness that penetrates from without to within is but the formative force that penetrates from within to without, we can have no inkling of painting's reality. 13
