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)

Ady, Attila József, and, later on, of Károly Kós, Sándor Gellért and Domokos Szilágyi. More recently, he discovered Villon, Apollinaire, Camus, Kafka and Solzhenitsyn too. Today, a remarkable collection of portraits depicting famous Transylvanian personalities on nearly fifty graphic sheets, decorates the gallery of the Kolozsvár Society, located in the main square of the city. Before Szatmárnémeti became a regular meeting point for us, our roads had crossed many times in Kolozsvár. It would be difficult to enumerate all the works by Paulovics we published in Korunk ('Our Era'), the journal edited in Kolozsvár, over more than four decades; we cannot give a full list of them in the absence of a complete repertory. I remember that we planned to have him as a graphics designer for our thematic issue on modernism as early as in March 1965. He had already completed an innovative design for the graphics and the layout when the death of party leader Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu's 'enthronement' wrecked our plans. Let me single out one more common project. When Korunk published Updike's novel, The Centaur, translated by Domokos Szilágyi, it let Paulovics add a mythological element to his graphics and paintings. Coming a bit closer to our everyday meetings, I would like to show a sample of the Paulovics oeuvre whose extent is difficult to measure. The works I am talking about are the ones hanging in my Kolozsvár flat. The Two of us with my grandfather, from 1980, is still strongly graphics influenced, but its white, gray and brown colors are undoubtedly powerful. The divided space of the surface highlights Time, the motive recurring in Paulovics's painting; the graphic artist/ painter takes a constant interest in the mutual relationship of generations and historical periods. I consider the ominous still life from 1978 a particularly good composition, and it obviously suggests more than what I can evoke by listing the details: a crumbling window-frame painted on the picture, a dark gray sphere, no stranger to modern painting, ar empty bluish glass, a lilac drapery, a pale yellow lemon cut in two, a black nervure in the corner and storm clouds above. The painting In memóriám G. S. (1 995), paying tribute to Sándor Gellért, folk poet from Mikola/Szatmárnémeti, relates both to Iserlohn, the German town in South Westphalia, and to the faraway Szatmár. An 'abstract' beam of light breaks the vision of colorful lines and patches, generating an apotheosis of Nature and Creation. The small oil painting called The Clown (1 992), which has traveled to Kelemen Mikes street, Kolozsvár from the artist's Barendorf workshop, is perhaps the finest piece in our collection. In aesthetics seminars, this work may prove that abstract painting is not necessarily abstract, and that a color is not irreconcilable with another. It may also illustrate the variety of the possible interpretations of any composition. Finally, there is a rather regular (?) watercolor, from Paulovics's new home in Szentendre, from an elegant neighborhood above the city's historical monument area: the picture, full of joy, warmth and ease, does not directly represent anything; it just creates the feeling of familiarity. To be sure, it is impossible to represent Paulovics's art by five paintings (and two ceramic bowls). One should expand this overview by mentioning the India ink series called D'43, for example, with its crosses, both traced and concealed, com-