Pistyur Imre: Litogenezis (Szentendre, 2011)

THE SCULPTOR'S HEALING STONES In the last years the brook Bükkös in Szentendre flooded several times so strongly that it carried large amounts of hard stones from the mountains into the town. The brook deposited them in such a way that the stones diverted the direction of flow: the water is not anymore rushing in its stone-bed but its meanders gently towards the Danube. Life has returned to the water, fish swim upwards from the river and one is happy to meet nature there. Ali this happened unnoticed, and what happened seems to be as evident as nature's laws and processes. So evidently happened onee that the teenager Imre Pistyur, the future seulptor grasped the elaw-ehisel to cut a seulpture from the stone. It was evident, since his ancestors were stone-cutters in Dalmatia. They fled from the Turkish oecupation 300 years ago to Szentendre. The family's name means stone-eutter, eistern builder. It was not tradition that compelled him to beeome a seulptor, instead, he took inspiration from the experienee, from the material, from nature, from the beauty of the stones he saw as a child in Csobánka. His first sculptures didn't seem to be chiselled by a seulptor but they looked like created by nature. Even when carving his latest works, his greatest ambition is to unravel the message hidden in the material, mainly in the hard andesite and andesitie tuff, adding whatever he wants to say or he can say about the world. His ehisel ereates shapes as if modelling nature's processes, and while the stone assumes the shape of man, animal or démon, it remains what it is: material förmed by time and weather. By touching it, we move back in time towards the mysterious beginning of life, as it was thousands and millions of years ago. By the way, Imre Pistyur likes when visitors touch and stroke his sculptures. He is aware of the elementary instinct, which leads the visitor's hand, when he wants more than see: he wants to feel the material. The reason might be the artist's intention to use nature's healing power to man's benefit. He was known in the seventies in Szentendre as the "herb-man". As he used to heal the body with herbai juices, he tries to heal the soul with the power hidden in stone; the focus of his art is on "humán virtues and weaknesses" and talking about them he seeks the truth and the completeness. His works' material is andesite, a volcanic rock. It is so hard and rough that it cannot be polished as smooth as the surface of marble. This makes the works really rustic and the deeper and essential relationship between the sculptor's work and nature's powers sounds plausible. As well as the artist's opinion saying that anything can serve as subject for the sculptural art from insect demons to mythological heroes and characters observed on the markét in Szentendre. This turns the artist into real scientist specialised in "litho-genesis", in natural laws causing the birth of stones and provoking their transformations. And this makes him to one of the few Hungárián sculptors, who are convinced that serious-mindedness and humour don't exclude each other but they are each other's condition. Since we can bear those powers, which shape our destiny, only with the help of the healing smile. Ernő P. Szabó