Csontó Lajos - Verba Andrea szerk.: Csontó Lajos: Munkák (PMMI kiadványai - Kiállítási katalógusok 16. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, Szentendre, 2005)
2005
... Lajos Csontó's creative strategy is nobly simple: he works with images and texts - the montage of text fragments. These images and texts are often photographs, paintings, moving and found pictures - with digital interference. The meaning of the elements of these montages enter into an interesting interaction with each other, the way the classics of the theory of montage claim: it's not the sum of the meaning of the individual elements that results in catharsis, rather, they annul each other and create a void that generates countless other interpretations in the spectator. The space between the columns is filled by videos projected onto the two sides of the cellar gallery. In front of the wall behind the columns there's a enormous surface resembling a knit textile fills the space. This tight, determined, symmetric gesture is familiar from Lajos Csontó [e.g. from the exhibition in the Szentendre Gallery, where the projected images of a head and limbs surrounded the spectator!. Between the projected videos we can see textile surfaces, one bears the text: "THERE'S STILL TIME", the other: "THERES NO MORE TIME". In the meantime, an invisible force pulls down the textile row by row, the vertical line of the textile thread nervously runs right and left and makes the text disappear. The series of images and the process turns back after a while, the textile and the text is reconstructed. It provides a special dynamism to the work that we alternately see the text and the texture fade away and then rebuild itself. This means that "consolation"and "panic" touch us simultaneously and their truth content erodes at the same time. A plain statement - and an inverted one. It is useless to evoke the rich mythological connotations of the yarn, weaving and time, to talk about film as a slice of TIME. And about how differently we experience life in the astonishing moment when we realize that we 're running out of time and life is finite. The award-winning film installation of my friend Mark Philips springs to mind, here, the sound of the sewing machine appearing on the screen enters into a peculiar interference with the camera. In the focus point of the irony of the videos, the installation covering the facing wall appears to be dramatic. Into the textile-like surface of the black nylon bags woven perpendicular to the horizontally stretched wires, the words HAVE NO FEAR are "crocheted" with blue (nylon! letters. I'm wondering whether the text has a stronger meaning-generating relationship with the material of the installation carrying it, or the evidence of "have no fear" already contains that absurd charge that could provide a suitable punch line to this exhibition. Have no fear - we know the subject of this sentence, only a person who sees our position from an intellectual, experiential or transcendent aspect can say that. Otherwise it is merely therapy, the symptomatic treatment of unsotvabte problems, consolation. This sentence exists in a void that falls outside the scope of alt philosophy, psychology or scientific paradigm. The opening of the exhibition presumably receives an unintended context because of the general elections and the approaching Holy Week. "A democrat is the person who is not afraid", said István Bibó; "Have no fear," said Jesus in Matthew's gospel. An artist named Christoph Schlingensief has also played with the mutually exclusive absurdity of faith and fear in his project (Church of Fear - Kirche der Angst! at the Venice Biennale (20031. We can continue the train of thought, but the dumb sparkle of the plastic of the garbage bag-textile (garbage bag, body bag, have no fear! warns us: drama and banality are at work here together, and the message might be precisely this uncertainty. F straight, one purl. Rudolf Pacsika
