Klemmné Németh Zsuzsa (szerk.): Triznya Mátyás 1922 - 1991 (Szentendre-Zebegény, 2012)

Rome never appeared for him as a commonplace or an outworn advertisement for tourists. He gradually approached the real essence of the eternal city. He was interested in the paradox of evanescence and timelessness. How can Rome be the symbol of vanitas and, at the same time, a triumphal town capable to renew of its own ruins, a New Age metropolis, where you can live, moreover, you can live well because it has preserved its human scale during the centuries just as Athens has. If you walk in the streets it is worth either looking up towards the tall columns, triumphal arches and dignified domes or looking down at the stones that emerge from anywhere like beings from the ground weaving the myth of past in secret. There are but few who are willing to untwist the network and Triznya was one who did it, “... in the Eternal City he matured to be an artist who developed aquarelle to a philosophical and meditative genre. ”4 For him painting was a device for meditation though he wrote studies on history as well but his aquarelles can tell us more about his ideas about the flourish, decay and renewal of our civilization.

Mátyás Triznya recognised and made it obvious for us that the remains of an old empire can become consubstantial with nature again just as slender cypresses receive the lonely decaying columns of one-time churches among them as if they were their relatives.

The main heroes of his pictures are vedutes and trees, ruins and wells, shadows living their own life on the walls of houses, “the blue sky” of Rome - under which István Szőnyi was not able to paint for some time - air carrying colours and light radiating from objects. Only people are missing among the walls.

4 László Szörényi: Előszó, Római Akvarellek Triznya Mátyás (1922—1991),

Kortárs Kiadó, Budapest, 2002. p. 5

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