Hann Ferenc: Paulovics. Kántor Lajos és Kocsis István írásaival (A PMMI kiadványai. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, 2008)

Hann Ferenc - The artist's career: an overview

taur, full of inner struggles, painful philosophical reflections and interwoven with ancient Greek myths, is about the last three days of a teacher in a country school. The half human, half horse figure of the centaurs are dual not only in shape but in character and behavior too. They are mostly wild, unruly creatures living in mountains and forests but Chiron, who educated Achilles and Jason, is immensely wise and benign, a real tragic hero. The representations of centaurs run through the history of art; they appear on works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Veronese, Rubens and Picasso, and the centaur is visible on the sky as well, being the traditional symbol of the Sagittarius. Yet, Paulovics's centaur series did not follow any prototype. He was interested in the impossible ambivalence of a centaur-like existence, in the drama and heroism behind it. His India ink drawings, rich in details, breaking the layers, sometimes resembling stage scenery {Centaur VI., 1975), sometimes contaminating (Centaur VII., 1978), remind us of the circumstances of the mid and the late 1970s, during the harsh dictatorship in Romania, in which the artist who wanted to express himself and to gain inner freedom had to live. The pieces of the centaur series may be the ones that show best the attitude which is present covertly in manv of his works: this is allusion, a reference to something, an indirect intimation of something unspeakable, something that can be seen only by those who have eyes to see and heard by those who have ears to hear. For us, a secret is not a secret: it is a painful, dramatic account of the historical period and the hidden doubts of a sensitive artist.