Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

MAGDA SZABÓ

On Krisztim Kókay's exhibition

The artist providing a cause for joy for all of us present today at her exhibition has been displaying her visions, absolutely realistic in their irreality, and the secrets, waiting to be solved, of her and also of our personality for some time.

This current harvest of hers is more mature, its taste exceedingly sweet and exceedingly bitter. We live in a hard world, under trying circumstances, if art doesn't help to bear what the problems of the present brought on those living on the ever-revolving plate of history, if there is no government that could do it. Only the creation of art is eternal, only the road shown us by the artist can help: the form of expression of this artist on show is really comprehensible. Just like our whole personal life hangs by a thread, the fate of the world, the fate of the cosmos turns on fiber, thinner than a single hair, or on a stroke of a writing tool in its place. And there is no rope nor Utopian vision about the saving of the human race that could be as strong as that thread, thinner than breath and blacker than black, or as that fine line that gives no quarter for itself and has no mercy for others. Voicelessly, they tell us what are we running from, where are we coming from, where are we going to, and where, in the jungle of excitements, fears, hopes and uncertainties, can we find the exit toward the faintly phosphorescent clearing of newborn hope. Krisztina Kókay is a textile artist and a graphic artist, but she is also a master of applied magic; she knows what only the select know, namely, that her art originates in cult. The significance of the thread, of the single line, the thread's stubborn resistance to being torn was discovered long ago by our nurturing nannies, the parents of all arts, the Greek. It is present when Ariadne's clew leads Theseus, ready to die, out of the labyrinth, when the unwanted passions give in before Penelope's woven fabric, and when the fate of Prince Endre is decided by the silk-and-gold thread, the theatrical prop of royal power and of murder, sung of by János Arany. And fate itself, the end of life is determined by three mythological women, the Fates, spinning and finally cutting the thread of life. Curiously, the artist is aware of those props as well that are not usually part of the stage set of her artistic battlefield, she is aware that her works contain an element of the cult of Christianity aside from the secular. Textile art, by the way, was practiced not only by the ladies of royal households. Behind the tapestries linger the shadows of immigrant craftsmen exiled from their countries on grounds of religion or politics, and if we look back to the earliest beginnings, the thread that has been tamed by Krisztina Kókay's exceptional talent coils back to the monasteries, among confessions and prayers sent up to heaven: the first textile artists in Hungary were churchmen. Which explains the graphic representation: the artist, without knowing it, is making a confession, she is telling God Almighty and the father confessor of her art, the world and everyone, the unspeakable. She says it with a needle thin graphical system of signs when she works with paper instead of threads. Each one of her pictures is a confession;