SZUROMI IMRE (Kiállítási katalógusok - Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2008)
FOREWORD Those who normally look for paintings of landscapes, still life, portraits or intimate scenes of life in an exhibition, will be surprised and maybe a bit lost when looking around in Imre Szuromi's exhibition. He is an artist, who is moved to paint not by a captivating sight but rather by an inner vision. The elements of the visible world are arranged in his paintings in unusual and sometimes dreamlike relations, but not in a provocative way, with excitement They arrange themselves softly, with a natural ease. We see unappropriated faces; we may follow disciplined looks, which wonder at the secrets of existence and which urge us to engage in a similar attention. The pictures remind us of those of Giotto, the master just before the generations of the great Renaissance, revealing a characteristic, magic architecture. The painter Imre Szuromi does not forget that he is an architect as well: he creates spatiality on his paintings and even more, in his visions too he deals with shape, weight and extension of the material, of the bodies. His colours are never harsh; their looming purity, their harmony captivates slowly the spectator. These paintings tell about man's archaic, elementary condition. Further, about the beauty and graveness of life, about pain, which we may carry in us shyly, hidden and with understanding. About the feast emerging from everydayness. When after an attentive orientation we spend sufficient time in front of the paintings, with the help of the title and sometimes of the words written on the picture, we may attain recognition and identification of concrete subjects: recollections of the Bible, elements of folk ballades, mostly known by all of us. These subjects are important for the artist and we never have the impression that they would serve merely as covers of something else, being pretexts for a question of the profession. We also cannot say that any of his paintings would not be more than the illustration for a traditional subject. Imre Szuromi is not preoccupied with the secrets of painting but with the secrets of human existence. With them he spends time. Regarding his 'ars poetica', we better quote a short poem of Rilke: "Oh, tell us, poet, what you do ? I praise. But those dark, deadly, devastating ways, how do you bear them, suffer them ? I praise. And then the Nameless, beyond guess or gaze, how can you call it, conjure it? I praise. And whence your right, in every kind of maze, in every mask, to remain true? I praise. And that the mildest and the wildest ways know you like star and storm? Because I praise. " (Leishman) The artist is 60 years old. Szentendre puts on display his works: in the Peter-Paul church, on the court façade of the Franciscan Grammar School and in the Danube promenade and he painted the outside fresco of the Retreat House of the Franciscans in Horány as well. His art adds to our spiritual wealth. God bless him with many productive years. István Jelenits 4
