RÁKOSSY ANIKÓ (Kiállítási katalógusok - Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2008)

TACITURN MEANS, WIDE DIMENSIONS, GIDDY DEPTHS "What you can see falling and tumbling as red and brown blocs and as leaves, those are the magic, discoloured leaves of my nature. Red, lacquer-like and fragile facts cover the surface of my body, which is condemned to be cut into pieces by heavenly daggers in the heat of their unpredictable attacks of inspiration, whenever rushes of wind bring them to me. Now everything is like leaves but these pointlessly scattered tangled facts suddenly grow huge and run towards me..." This poetic (pictorial) inspired thoughts - published in the catalogue of the artist's exhibition called "From the autobiography of a painter" in the Ernst Museum in Budapest - may serve as a key to the painting art of Anikó Rákossy, and even to the pictures of the collection selected from her works created after the turn of the century and mainly in the past one or two years. The big painting-complexes consisting of several big pictures - and constructed into extraordinary X and Y shapes - the medium-sized and smaller pictures painted on canvas and paper, mainly with plex feather and the compositions painted and drawn with a mixed technology join consequently those painting efforts, which replaced from 1990 on her graphic, applied graphic and illustrating activities during the seventies and eighties of the past century. Thus, we register such a painting oeuvre of almost two decades of creative period, exclusively determined by abstract painterly expressions, which uses and synthesizes the lessons drawn from several trends of modern art and so from the constructive picture building, having such a specific significance in the art of Szentendre, further, from the abstract expressionist projection and from the lyric abstract art creation. The speciality of Rákossy's painting finds shape in its capacity to organise these three, actually contradictory creative attitudes, aspects or parallel efforts into extremely sensible, exciting unity, while finely balancing the opposites. Anikó Rákossy develops her compositions from the illusionist and playful visualisation of spaces and planes together, weaving them like a tapestry producing a pattern from animated shapes of leaves or wings or maybe sails, joining each other, emerging from each other, appearing from a whirling indefinability and crystallizing into shape and making the pictures unstoppable radiant and pulsating. These once organic, once geometric shapes depicted in the repetition of variability and fugacity, characterised by curbed and sometimes strait dividing lines, interpreted once by soft picturesque lines, once by harder, stricter outlines soar and fall, ascend and swim away floating. All these shapes are carried by a characteristic colouration, which marks the painter's oeuvre emblematically: deep shades of reds and browns, burnt sienna and cadmiums, whose gloom is tempered by softer colours, shades of ochre flashing or spreading only in the latest series of paintings. One has the impression that the reddish-brown seriousness, the gloomy picturesqueness turning into obscuration and emerging again from darkness becomes in these latest works with lighter shades a bit harder and rawer, which is emphasised by the way of picturebuilding in these compositions - but the dynamism and intensity of the latent spaces and of the forms and shapes rising and issuing from these latent spaces does not subside. The intention of calmly creating order and system clashes again and again with bursts of emotions, with wild rovings of waves of emotions - and in the atmospheric radiation of these works we witness the intimate, passionate, secret-laden soul-projection of the painter's inner ego. In 1991 the exhibition in the Művésztelepi Galéria (Artists' Colony Gallery) in Szentendre was the occasion when we granted the "title" of painter to Anikó Rákossy, who was known and acknowledged as graphic artist and illustrator so far. Due to the collections presented every two-three years in the last decade of the past and the first decade of the new century we could witness the consequent building-up of an oeuvre being taciturn, restrained in painterly means but visiting and revealing wide dimensions and giddy depths. The new paintings presented to the public in spring 2008 confirm this firm belief of us. Tibor Wehner 4