Muladi Brigitta - Veszprémi Nóra szerk.: A festmény ideje – Az újraértelmezett hagyomány (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai)

English texts - Millennial Realism. Gábor Rieder

as an abstract metaphysical, but as an organic part of the body and the brain. This kind of naturalism seems to pervade the painterly practices of Sensaria in which revitalized tradition, living experience, and the material pleasure of painting dominate. On the level of metaphors we are almost at the point of pictorial turn and technorealism. When the editors of the periodical October published a sharp criticism of visual studies, the science of visual culture, disguised as a survey, they accused the representatives of this new science with creating a cult of the disembodied or dematerialized image. In other words, they warned not to deprive pictures and the act of creating images of its social and political context. In this debate, the need for a complex system of viewpoints became evident, which could be called "cultural-scientific" monism according to the example of naturalized epistemology became known as epistemoiogical monism. In the much diversified practice of visual studies, the work of Barbara Stafford or W. J. T. Mitchell leads us in this direction. Toward a science of images, taking into consideration all the differences between practice and theory, the borders dividing various disciplines and various artistic genres, and still believing in communication and the transfer between cells, as inevitable for life and evolution as well. So, in the spirit of cultural osmosis, I would conclude that discursive and tangible borders between fiction and reality, "disembodied images" and "embodied mind" are trespassable. This is already hinted visually by the products of naturalist and technorealist painting. In spite of this, and to help crystallize cultural phenomena, I sustain a dualistic logic based on oppositions. However, I also try to refer to artistic examples that defy this logic, or even attempt to deconstruct it. Eventually, saluting in front of perspectivism and cultural relativism, I even reverse the opposition, pointing to its dependence of its context, or in other words: naturalists shall become realists, technorealists are about to turn into naturalists. Millennial Realism Gábor Rieder The tradition of figurativeness remained uninterrupted in 20th-century Western painting, despite the anti-figurative programmes of the radical neo-avant-garde isms. Though realistic artists were banned from the chief forums of progression, they "kept the flame alive" (R. B. Kitaj) in the dubious no-man's land between the wider public and the avant-garde grand art. Ignoring the current trends in fashion, David Hockney in America, the London School in Great Britain (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, etc.), Gerhard Richter in Germany and Balthus in France ensured the continuity of classic modern figurative painting. The New Painting of the seventies and eighties (heftige Malerei, trans-avant-garde) returned to this modernist formal idiom, which has survived in isolation and which relied on expressionistic foundations, to reclaim the front-rank position of the oil-on-canvas technique and traditional mimesis. Meanwhile, photographic hyperrealism, born in America in the mid-sixties, was still in its vigorous late bloom. The mixed marriage of hyperrealism, which was rooted in photographic media images, and a recovered figurative expressionism brought forth a realistic painting in the nineties, which was diverse, rich and important worldwide, and was inseparably involved with the visual world of those new media (television, video, computer) which had grown up along with it. It was thanks to concentrated mega-displays at the turn of the millennium that the new figurative trends reached the focus of interest (and progression). Parallel with these developments (and with minor alterations), the Hungarian scene saw similar changes. It was in 2001 that a new generation of realistic artists, fresh graduates of the Academy, entered the scene. The commercial galleries were quick to snatch up the newcomers, and made them share the limelight with the representatives of the first and second generation of hyperrealists. In the so-called "technorealism debate" that ran in the magazine Műértőfrom July 2003 for almost a year, those theoretical positions became outlined which underpinned the new and not-so-new (photo)realistic painting. During this theoretical exchange, under the barrage of analyses from the side of figurai tradition and from those approaching from the electronic media of contemporary art, a new, "a truly distinctive trend" (Katalin Aknai) was articulated. Christened technorealism, the style did not constitute a paradigm shift, even if its success contributed to the waning of the late-modernist, anti-market attitude of artists. Technorealism was the first trend in the Hungarian visual arts. Its lifespan indicated that the slow succession of art historical "waves" had given way to a piling up of "minor schools," which (also) try to conform, during those few years of their existence, to ephemeral demands of the market and changing popularity figures. Reflecting the media reality, the atmosphere of technorealism is icy and professional, now suggesting the metallic chilliness of machines, now the horror of Hollywood's bestiary. It was on the back of the millennial surge of figurativeness, with a certain lag, that the other important realist school in Hungarian painting, the Sensaria Group gained considerable publicity. János Sturcz was the one to point out, in the heat of the technoralism debate, that they existed. "Finally, I want to call attention to a group who enrich the realistic spectrum of painting I have outlined, adding further approaches. 'Radical neoconservatism,' I think, would describe their activity most appropriately. Calling themselves the Sensaria group after Titian's workshop, these artists, who are in their thirties (Csaba Filp, Krisztián Horváth, Attila Kondor, Dániel László, Tamás Lörincz, Lehel Kovács and others), refuse to take seriously the early modernists' precept that traditional painting has lost its momentum and cannot be continued, just as they do not subscribe to Baudrillard's assumption that reality has ceased to be, and all there is its simulacrum, the semblance delivered by mass media. They followed up their refusal to believe in modernist and postmodernist principles with rejecting to copy photographs or other technological images, and painting instead with the land or the human figure in view, using the techniques, materials, genres and subjects of the classic masters, and aiming, above all, at the intellectual and spiritual wholeness of the great ancestors. They are conservative in the original sense of the word: they are motivated by the protection and passing on of values." An arts society with a serious institutional background, the Sensaria is more of a contemporary neoconservative academy than a trend in painting.