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

SILENCE

(a note on the Chinese Ink Drawing)

In his aesthetics Ferruccio Busoni writes that in European music he can identify only two elements that pertain to real music: the fermata (the held note) and the pause.

The pause, the rest, silence means the maximal fullness of sound. This is what in the Chinese ink drawing is empty space, nothingness. The European image is 98 per cent music and two per cent pause (quiet expanse, unbounded silence), the Chinese is at least sixty per cent silence and forty per cent music. The Chinese drawing floats in nothingness. There are pictures in which there is no pause: that is oppressive. In a sculpture the pause consists in what is torso-like, the missing limb, the stone left unworked, raw.

THE THUNDERING PAUSE

It is not the object that has to be given form, but the nothingness. A well-turned pause. It is this nothingness that God inhabits. Once, only once since the existence of the world, has it happened that God could take no more and almost spoke. Almost. His heart leapt and he wanted to cry out. This was the moment that Christ on the cross sighed: Eli, eli, lama sabachtani!

But He did not speak. O, if only I knew what He wanted to say. And after these words there arose the greatest pause imaginable. This roaring pause. This thundering pause.

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