Hann Ferenc: Paulovics. Kántor Lajos és Kocsis István írásaival (A PMMI kiadványai. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, 2008)
Kántor Lajos - László Paulovics (from a short distance)
László Paulovics LAJOS KÁNTOR (from a short distance) I felt we were always close, even when, in a geographical sense, we lived hundreds or sometimes thousands of kilometers away from each other, depending on where he found a home during his travels, while Kolozsvár remained a fixed point for me. Can our closeness be explained by the fact we were born underthe same sign of the zodiac? (I can call Laci Paulovics my younger brother because I am eight days older than him.) Our encounters were not connected to any anniversary but to common tasks and, of course, to the occasions when we visited each other as friends. The premieres at the Szatmárnémeti theatre offered us the first (and frequent) occasions to meet. As a stage and costume designer from 1962 to 1985, he was concerned with how a literary critic saw the theatre company which, at that time, included actors like András Csiky, Emma Elekes, Alajos Ács. If I had to analyze Paulovics's stage design work, I should write a comprehensive study. Here I only refer to one of his works, the stage design for Imre Madách's The Tragedy of Man, directed by József Szabó at the Nagyvárad theatre. The larger 'designs' he presented to the city of Szatmár throughout the decades, the open-air ones and those made for a church after 1990, should also be mentioned in detail. Graphic art and painting, however, constitute the core of Paulovics's oeuvre. (Just a short remark: he proved his talent in ceramics as well.) As a student, he had excellent masters in Kolozsvár. The teaching staff included Tibor Kádár who, unlike the majority of his colleagues in that period, opened his students'eyes to modern artists. Yet, some of his masters came from a chronological distance. According to Zoltán Banner, 'Cézanne, Picasso and Róbert Berény, the modern masters who were building up their oeuvre in a logical way, influenced him the most by the end of his college years' In 1965, the poet Géza Páskándi, another of his friends from Szatmár, described this master-to-student relationship as follows:'To learn from Picasso's treasury of forms, Csontváry's biblical monumentality and visions, the great overseas painter of melted clocks, or even from Moore's cell- and amoeba-shaped sculptures —is not a problem for Paulovics because he feels that what he wants to say is his own, therefore their impact is not simply an impact because it results in his thorough knowledge of arts.' In view of the subsequent periods of the artist who has just turned seventy, I mention two further sources of inspiration, folk art objects and the vast literary heritage of European wr'ters. Paulovics made a set of poem illustrations and numerous writer portraits. He oecame deeply interested in the likeness, poetry and prose of Sándor Petőfi, János Arany, Imre Madách, Endre
