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

English texts - Time of Painting. Attila Kondor

but visually speaking even they are not differentiated enough. The point in the realism of Velazquez or Brueghel is that while these pictures seem informal and simple, natural and real like visions, we need to concentrate to recognize the extremely rigorous artistic form. Today's distinctive realism can be transformed by visual experiences. The nature of lights and colours, the materials. A single tiny flash can introduce a new element into a painting, like Vermeer's drops of light, or Van Gogh's gas lamp. When the photograph is not merely one of the many tools of the painter (and one that is dispensable), it will be more of an obstacle in the way of personal experience. When a painter is more interested in the nature of representation, or in how the technological image will appear on his or her canvas, he or she is more of a researcher than an artist. Paradoxically, the need for reality in contemporary art was boosted by the very profusion of artificial images. The profusion of pictures that accurately document created, on the one hand, the need for, and the standard of, a certain degree of reality, but leave us unsatisfied, on the other, because the pictures are not real. So if artificial images can satisfy the demand for images, they cannot cater for the desire for reality. Hand-made pictures have an element that make every other vision external. And reality is external experience turned internal. The painting already carries the internalized experience; this is why painterly illusion is - still - so stunning. Only figurative painting is capable of representing human interaction accurately, as regards psychology and detail. This is the area one is most knowledgeable about. Body language meets the painterly idiom. Non-figurative painting, on the other hand, can evoke associations of nature or the built environment. Modern art gave up on the psychological content inherent in realistic representation, and passed it on to surrealism. With this, it discarded the extreme tension that is provided by the simultaneity of the external and the internal. For a picture to be considered realist, it has to convey enough information about visible reality to evoke the sensation of a genuine vision. The degree of the sense of reality depends on the emotional strength of the perception of the vision. The complexity of the sense of reality depends on its capacity to effect, beside the consciousness, the subconscious; to what extent and in what manner it effects all the levels of the senses, the instincts and the consciousness. This is how reality becomes both poetic and expressive. Time of Painting Attila Kondor Aphoristic snippets When viewing a masterpiece, we seem to be leaving behind, slowly and mysteriously, our fragmentary everyday time, because the time it took to create the work, together with the moment of conclusion, is always present at this moment. This immediacy of transparency creates a special and unique situation for the viewer. The picture remains unchanged in its essence, while the same viewing experience transforms us, its viewers. In the process, the painting involves the viewer in its own time. The process of painting transforms the contingent contents of personal time into subjective time. During this, we may observe what cyclic theories, myths and experience refer to as symbols. Holding the long-stemmed brush, arm stretched, setting off the motion from the shoulder, our posture changes too. The motions can constantly direct our attention towards the spiritual Centre, which can become their origin. The masterworks of painting are, first and foremost, not products of aesthetics, but visible traces of an investigation into the questions of being. The careless viewer may think that a painting, like a photograph, freezes the drifting sand of time. On the contrary. A painting begins where a photograph ends. It is not that we cut out and contemplate a single frame from the film of time, but that we elevate the material of contingent, personal experience by contemplation at a moment that is distinguished or that we distinguish. We do not freeze the stream but return to its source. We stretch this moment into what seems eternity, and do not let it pass, creating thereby the time of the painting.