Gopcsa Katalin: A Sümegi Művésztelep (1919-1931) és kortárs képzőművészek paletta kiállítása (Veszprém, 2006)

It is particularly interesting when artists pursuing different forms of art make use of the palette. Such an artist is László Horváth, who works with porcelain and has often employed delicate signs reminiscent of East Asian calligraphy not only on his ornamental bowls but also on the white surface of his palette marked with intersecting red lines. The textile artist Edit Lugossy spread her soft and warm wool-fibre material against the palette, while applied artist Ákos Tamás painted occasional sketch portraits with great ease on the palettes, including depictions of some of his own porcelain figurines. A playful pun on words, the peculiar "Hareduck" figure of György Györgydeák's private mythology is an integral part of his artistic work, in the same vein as Somogyi s vivid red-and-yellow painted composition. Szilvásy's bizarre palette with the "forgotten" finger is complemented with birds "flown over" from the artist's other paintings, serving as a light-hearted salute from the studio. Sándor Bátai's board might as well be a message appearing from beneath the peeled-off surface of crumbling walls, a fragment of a strange, bygone era, while Kulcsár s Etudes design features a sequence-like variety of similar motifs. Several artists emphasize in their works the shape and oval cut of the palette as a compositional principle (Vágfalvy and Ughy). In stark contrast, the boxed-in object that Margit Bárdy added on top of her palette allows us an intimate view of the artist's life that is much like a confession: the everyday tools of the artist's studio, mementoes of her time spent creating, are included in her modest inventory

—the small objects surrounding an urban artist living in the latter half of the twentieth century are transformed from mere accessories to works of art. A surprise feature of the exhibition is the set of works prepared for this occasion by artists from Transylvania. Apart from the brilliant ideas and the striking visual jests, an overwhelming and often unsettling message of astonishing vitality is also very much apparent in these works. Paying no heed to the undefined, unwritten rales of this incidental art form, unconstrained by the slighdy overstressed devotion to quasi-conventional practices, the works of art displayed here possess an elemental force, which is intensified occasionally by the firmly shaped outlines, and while they started out as a passionate, dazzling experiment, they eventually became, due to their well-defined and condensed nature, entirely autonomous creations. Palette works were not conceived simply on the spur of some passing moment, but they involve much more: the reformulation of the creative existence of the artist and, through the incorporation of former objects of attribute, the creation of works of monumental significance. Veszprém-Sepsiszentgyörgy, 14. October 2006. Katalin Gopcsa Art historian Dezső Laczkó Museum, Veszprém