Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)

Over and above the traditional, classic gobelins, she continued to keep textile painting in focus and also let her graphic works and her creativity as a graphic artist emerge as an equally significant creative field. In her own words: "Drawing provides intimacy and a chance to improvise for me, it relaxes the boundaries of time and lets me react immediately."

Besides these elements of constancy, the changes are also characteristic of the three decades of her artistic road. Perhaps the most significant ones are her leaving behind all forms of applied art in favor of autonomic works of specifically artistic and esthetic intent and her turning from representative art, from the concrete visualization of the concrete motifs of the real world, towards elaborating an abstract medium of picture and matter that is exclusively her own. In the company of the gobelins, still linked to the traditions and resplendent with pictorial effects, the painted textile tapestries are mostly built up of a mystery-filled flood of patterns, networks, tiny grids and textures. Vertical, horizontal and slanting lines run across this structure, creating emphasis at some points, getting distorted by small shifts at other points. The web-like construction is ruffled up, just like a veil flutters, the breeze ripples the water surface or some small pain flashes through your body. The flow of the tiny elements within the irregular outlines is usually disturbed by a hiatus: a thin strip like a lightning, an empty space like a crater, a crack, breaks the surface. On the graphical works - on the drawings and prints - the lyricism of abstraction and the dream-like quality of a surreal vision fight each other, or, rather, connect to each other creating harmony; the transiences of the free and of the constructed, hardness and softness, forms strict and yielding come together in a unity in which even the irregularities become part of the system. Krisztina Kókay's lines and strokes, traces of ink and pencil are ethereally elaborate, immensely meticulous and are born from an incredible patience: the extravagant accumulation of details, the web-like construction and all the countless elements create a bold comprehension. But the theme or the content of a Kókay textile or drawing cannot be known, cannot be positively determined. We might perhaps find the source of the abstract visual representation of abstract ideas far from the medium of the outside world, in the inner regions of the soul. The artist herself put it this way in a conversation: "When the outside world is ruled by disorder, chaos and noise, one can preserve oneself with the help of meditation, a special kind of relaxation and willpower. That way the artist can create the atmosphere necessary and indispensable to creative work. I try to work on a drawing the same way a poem or a piece of prose condenses or flows self-oblivi- ously. One sensitively adopts the rhythm of life and transforms it into the works. The textile or the paper reflects the turmoil of emotions."

Krisztina Kókay's career has been interwoven with the era of renewal and flourishing of Hungarian textile art - however, this artist has not joined the movement of spectacular renewal but beat her own lonely path, assumed her own stance, which is the independent world of deep contemplation created by her works. Krisztina Kókay's introspective works, radiating her oriental meditative leanings suffused with the ancient spirituality of creation, do not only emphasize the significance of creation but also that of reception, practiced with adequate humbleness. The visitors of the artist's exhibition of a splendid collection of works in the Christian Museum in Esztergom in the fall of 1997 were able to experience that depth of reception.

OPENING SPEECH, KERESZTÉNY MUZEUM, ESZTERGOM, 5. JANUARY, 1997