Csontó Lajos - Verba Andrea szerk.: Csontó Lajos: Munkák (PMMI kiadványai - Kiállítási katalógusok 16. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, Szentendre, 2005)

2004

Ever since Lajos Csontó has become an artist, he has been writing a visual diary. Not really about the events, rather about the way he experiences, interprets them. He conducts a sort of self-therapy, in which images and text fragments whirl and randomly attach to each other to present an inarticulate sentiment - tike during analysis - opening the way for the freely flowing associations. The image lines up next to speech-magic and the power of the spectacle, and they force the spectator to start an internal monologue, introspection, rather than a conversation. Depending on which part of his life and within that, in which moment does the silent, amorphous turmoil, the incessant internal work of interpretation receive a visual articulation, the scope it spans narrows or expands. Sometimes he raises a monument to the memory of a relationship about to end, flashing its mental stages that can also be recounted in commonplaces; sometimes he struggles with the Father-figure; or visualizes the outburst of carnal desire. At other times he is concerned by his own place in the changing art scene, and enters into a literal visual symbiosis with people he finds important, or, again literally, he strings himself onto a chain of people formed of artists and art historians. When he enters the whirlpool of the all-consuming popular culture, he finds himself and his family sucked in by this culture, and each of them emerges from the battle as Madonna, Skywalker, Sean Connery, and he himself as Travolta. The diary is not written and the identification process does not take place alongside a biomorphous growth process, a fulfillment, as Csontó professes the principle of the fluid individual, the continuously changing, forming identity instead of a fixed personality. The process can be rather modeled as the movement of an amoeba: it sometimes wants to devour the world and spills onto it, stretching, cautiously feeling, but from time to time it draws back, and returns into itself, to the internal struggles of the soul. Like the cell that turns back and reunites with itself after dividing instead of the prescribed continuous division, increasing perfection and development. This miniature event, a looped segment of a scientific educational film from the archives opens the current installation. As if we were entering a church with a single nave, an elongated, narrow space, into which light enters from the side - in this case, from projected images. "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body," said Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (6:19, 201, and these lines are interpreted here both spiritually and materially - an enormous body forms the church, a gigantic head is visible on the site of the altar, legs and arms fill its length. The face facing us dominates the space as a Pantocrator head, and sometimes it seems to don the image of God, although not of God the creator, the ruler, the judge, but the image of a suffering, crucified man wearing a crown of thorns, or rather the image of the dead Jesus with closed eyes carved in snow-white stone. The hand is a part of the body that can almost speak, Quintitian said. "For do we not use it for gaining pleasure, causing pain, to express hesitation, confession, punishment, measure, quantity, numbers and time?" Here, the palm holds life, which proceeds in front of us in the form of objects and substances, some of which are elements like earth and water; others are biblical and Christian symbols like bread, oil, grains, grape, cross, mixed with the symbols of the Passion of Christ, a small metal chalice and nails. On the right, the fist bears the signs of the crucifixion - either the hand of Christ or the hand of Saint Francis, who came into contact with the divine through the stigmas. Or is it perhaps the artist's hand, who went to a Franciscan secondary school? On the opposite side, the left leg a sentence materializes on the slowly changing images: "Good life awaits you." Who knows where, in this life, or is it a message from the afterworld? According to the dualism of Jewish-Christian culture, the installation evokes not only heaven and earth, but the basic principles, the supreme Good and the supreme Evil as well, the tatter in the form of Hitler, which seems to appear for a moment in the constantly changing permutations of the face. As if the demagogue rhetoric of the Axis of Evil that legitimizes the politics of superpowers, the triumphant view of the world reduced to basic categories that had already lead to global conflicts entered from the external world. The mutilated body, which had lost its integrity, evokes this association as well, as the white shrouds allude to the lonely agony of the dying person, his separation from the living. The hand with the gaping wound clenches into a fist, then stretches, as if we were witnessing the moment of agony in close-up, while on the other side the film of his life seems to run in front of the departing. The leg on the side of the active hand undergoes a slow transformation: it turns into a pig's foot, then a dog's foot, and finally, into the fin of a fish. The transformation is very much part of Christian culture, but here, it is not about the resurrection of the soul, the detachment from the transitory body, but on the contrary, about continuously being locked into carnal pleasures, or the circle of life, reawakening in different bodies, reincarnation. But is this the way we imagine reincarnation, to be born again as a dog, as a pig? Is it more of a punishment, as if we were descending into Bosch's visions of hell? In this context, the message "Good life awaits you" on the adult leg on the opposite side refers to the possibility of another life rather than to the promise of eternity. Nevertheless, the sign may also be a dogtag attached to the leg: in this case it is a cynical message to survivors and a soul-strengthening internal prayer for the departing. Of course, a direct chain of association leads to prisons and concentration camps. But it is more likely that the constantly changing, merging, never recognizable face and the mutating leg that evokes horror movies can be classified as grotesque, and Bakhtin is the possible key to their interpretation. "Grotesque representation shows phenomena in the state of change, unfinished metamorphosis, death and birth, growth and origin. The connection with time, changeability is the constitutive, determining element of all grotesque representation. Its other related trait is ambivalence: grotesque representation always involves (or at least signals) the both poles of change: old and new, the dying and the newborn, the beginning and the endpoint of the metamorphosis. "(Mikhail Bakhtin: The Art of Francois Rabelais, Európa Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1982, p. 34} "...Contrary to the canons of the modern age, the grotesque body is not separate from the surrounding world, it is not closed, finished, it is not ready, it keeps spilling out of its boundaries, its own contours," [p. 36} Bakhtin wrote about the preenlightenment image of the body, which appears to return at the end of the millennium. The head that structures and contracts space is perhaps the head of the artist, since the imprint of his face also appears on Veronica's veil. We seem to have entered a psychoanalytic session come to life, the repressed fears, anxieties are retched to the external world in the form of floating images and shreds of memories. According to this, the desired self, the civilized, controlling superego appears as Christ; the beast within man, the evil to be repressed in the form of Hitler, and the temptation of uniformity diluted in consumption also floats in as the image of a product, a chocolate Easter bunny, turning the motionless face of the artist torn between the divine and the depraved into a grotesque grin. In the left hand archaic and religious symbols interspersed with the objects