Péreli Zsuzsa: PADLÁSTÖRTÉNELEM (Kiállítási katalógusok - Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2010)

LOFT-STORY Zsuzsa Pereli is a passionate visitor of lofts. She loves finding treasures under dusty beams: an orphan girl's letter from 1950 in a loft in Velemér, the homework written in 1905 on a page of a calendar by one of the last potters in Gödörháza, Vilma Both. She discovers jugs, reels, photos turned brown by the passing time. Her loft-visits for rescuing finds give birth to magic works. They touch our hearts because objects, faces, tastes, gestures, voices, smells settle upon each other in our soul-lofts - and what else is the historic, artistic Past as a virtual loft, with milliards of memories settled upon each other? Zsuzsa Péreli touches and conjures them up from Time, like the "old-photo family" on her tapestry called "To the memory of a kermis in Kercaszomor" and the music band - maybe from Máramaros - with the peasant players of violin and gardon: "The musicians have come back" - have they ever been here at all? And where have all the soldiers gone? - hell-weed flutters above the sad soldier of "To the memory of military service" - and what is floating around him, clouds or waves of soldier graves? "The Blessed Virgin Mary is sitting on the golden branch of a golden tree..." cites Ilona Gálik from Nógrádsipek the archaic prayer. And the rosecheeked piety of the Virgin-figurines dressed up by village women on pilgrimages shines on the face of Zsuzsa Péreli's "Blessed Virgin". Votive offerings wrapped in the glitter of golden yarn: feet, hands praying for recovery and a small Hungary hanging from a tricoloured thread - shall it ever recover? A faceless burnt out Madonna - a black absence - is depicted on "1989, Christmas". The metal parts of the orthodox icon glow around her in golden light: pieces of bugs and cartridge hulls in the tangle of golden threads: the grotesque votive-objects of the revolution in Romania in 1989. The "Poor Angel" hangs on grey wings; coins stuck to him pull him downwards from Heaven. Concrete phalanstery of a paneltown under him: what will become of us in a money-centred world, which is wasting its soul? - asks the artist. And she replies to the question with the floating wonder of the "Aequilibrium", the white-clad, winged creature of hope glittering like gold, the butterfly-angel of the rediscovered balance between heaven and earth. Zsuzsa Péreli weaves herself her ephemeral gobelins with humble, long and tiring work. Few do this today. The six members of the artist group Manual (she was one of the founders) choose a symbol of various meanings as its logo: a hand with six fingers. A child born with six fingers was held a "táltos" (a kind of shaman) in earlier times. Zsuzsa Péreli has special talents. She feels the soul of things. Whatever she does, weaving a tapestry, making an ethereal drawing or some special paper-relief - whatever she touches, everything has a soul. Her táltos-fingers feel not only the traditions. A contemporary absurd idea of surrealist touch is her double-faced tapestry "Amnesia": a man's face on one side in the style of Mór Jókai's novels and of old pictures; the woman's face beside him is a shapeless tangle of threads, the back side of the tapestry. But when we turn it, the man's face disappears in the tangles of oblivion. Rootless heads float on the weft-yarns - left free by an avant-garde gesture: "Icon, end of the 20th century". Its parallel is the "Landscape, end of the 20th century" horrible objects attack from under and from above and try to strangle a landscape with green foliage, a house hiding in the woods, a sky with wavy clouds. The horror is woven in the gobelin: PETbottles picked from the dustbin, crushed cigarette box, used injection needle - a shocking match of modern art's "lost property" with the most noble gobelin traditions. Zsuzsa Péreli looks into the frightening, deep well of our times. Still, her tapestries suggest hope. Still there is a bit of green, a bit of sky everywhere - still there are places of refuge. The gold-woven, world-end couple of the "Outlook from the believable" looks out from the black and white geometry of reality into a blue darkness - or maybe to the moon, which - even if not present - seems to shine on every work of Zsuzsa Péreli. These works radiate secrets and silence. A pious silence dominates over one of her main, huge tapestries, called "Anthem": beyond the burning roads and mortal landscapes of history, a heavenly church with pointed cloud-arch keeps us calling reminding us of the archaic prayer collected by Zsuzsanna Erdélyi: "I see the Heaven's door open Outside golden Inside merciful

..." Zsuzsa Péreli has a rare sensual relationship not only with the nature but with the supernatural too. "Where is the beautiful Garden of Paradise" says the prayer of Gyurka Raffaelné Jankó Rozália from Egyházaskozár - and as if this question is asked on Zsuzsa Péreli's works. Her longing to leave and her research of the past are not due to nostalgia, which her sense of humour and subtle irony spare her. We consider her the master of real and spiritual loft research, garlanded with a forget-me-not wreath. Even rosemary, the plant of remembrance in Anglo-Saxon countries may be mixed in the wreath. Swinging on the waft-yarns of her self-portrait "Sentinelle", she is sitting on the constructivist still-life of old homespun pieces like an observing bird on its nest. Or like barefooted Virgin Marys on the horned moon on the pictures of village painters. She finished her latest work in May 2010, after having been pinned to the loom for seven months. Its title is: "The opposite bank" Where we always wish to be. When we are on the other bank. Zsuzsa Péreli's works have a magic power: they are capable to lift and carry us to the opposite bank. Into a desired world. And they are able to achieve that we return as better people. I think, before we commit something, we should first look at a Péreli-gobelin. And then maybe we won't commit it. Gabriella Kernács 3