Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
JUDIT SZEIFERT Breeze pictures, secret textures Krisztina Kókay's drawings and textile pictures The same way clouds cast shadows on mountain ranges, on the iridescent surface of lakes and oceans, Krisztina Kókay's drawings are cast upon the surface of the paper. The drawings are not the shadows; they seem to lift off from the surface, and, like clouds over a sheet of water, they leave dancing fragments of shadow on the paper. The drawing and its shadow together form the diaphanous facture. We feel that the works of Krisztina Kókay float in the space between the paper or canvas serving as their basic material and the viewers' eyes, while her drawings and gobelins also seem to grow organically from the carrying material, enhancing the characteristics of the paper and the textile, and also the difference, similarity and uniformity of their textures. Her way of working in graphics is similar to weaving: she develops the organic surfaces of her drawings by interweaving the small strokes. Her drawings and gobelins seem to be shadows hovering between existence and non-existence, projections of visions of memories conjured from the past, apparitions of the sensitive flickering of the soul. The determining experience of her pictures takes its nourishment from the recollection of the past, near and distant. Her compositions floating and falling in a metaphysical timelessness suggest historical perspectives that have a significance far beyond the boundaries of human existence (e.g. Recollection, 1990; Roman fragment I-II). But we also feel that these works were born from an actual set of experiences. Childhood (Our old gate, 2000; Old garden, 2000), characteristic motifs of her beloved native Esztergom (e.g. lofty Castle, 1992), the regularly visited artists' colony in Kecskemét (Kecskemét I-III) inspired these interwoven factures spanning across space and time, formed with patience and humbleness. One part of the meticulous, richly detailed pencil drawings evolves, web-like, from minute particles linked to each other organically, just like natural phenomena or living organisms (e.g. That which helps to survive, 1992; Resurrection, 1992). The shape of the small sub-units, approaching the square or the rectangle, but still irregular, increases the organic effect. Graphic illustrations such as In the tower and Pain (1992), ink drawings such as the above-mentioned Lofty Castle and Noah's Ark (1998), as well as gobelins "evolved" from these pictures all show this kind of picture-building blocks resembling mosaic tiles, broad-stones or cobblestones. These works comprise a series of small steps, shifts and phases, since they are alike as much as they are different. We are walking on the road of delicate flutters, of a spiraling curve of time planes, when we look at them one after the other. Into the undulating, breathing, even sighing surface of Pain, built up of elements resembling broad- stones, a sharp white horizontal line cuts a gaping chasm, while in the case of In the tower, the web-like surface does "split" into two. In Noah's Ark and Lofty Castle the texture seems to have unraveled, the organically consistent building process seems to have been disrupted; but it is also possible that Krisztina Kókay recorded the unfinished state of these pictures. Both pictures outline a semicircular arch, in an ever closer approximation of the form of the chasuble (or rather its mirror image), the concrete meaning of which she reveals in the ink drawing series Mantle I-IV from 1999, and in the large-sized travelling drapery Mantle II (2000). Mantle I-IV belongs to another group of Krisztina Kókay's drawings, in which the visual systems of relations are made up of small, hatch-like lines and in which the similarities of the surface finish and factural effects to weaving are the most evidently manifest. Here the rectangular grid of the structure completely disappears, "dissolves", as it were, among the texture of the little strokes.
