Kókay Krisztina (Esztergom, 2005)
PÁL KŐ Along Krisytina Kókay's unreeled thread of Ariadne Krisztina Kókay's exhibition is a revelation for me! We started our career in the legendary ffl/B class and it gives me great pleasure to say... that 80 percent of the class is still true to it. Let me recall some of the names to give you an inkling of this class: Daniela Bikácsi, painter; Agnes Kecskés, gobelin artist; Dalma Korányi; István Lisztes; József Rátonyi; Ferenc Gyurcsek; Lajos Maczky (Pál Kő), sculptors; Zsuzsa Gyimes, icon painter; Katalin Bencsik, painter; Eva Buchmüller, actor, dramaturg, translator and manager, the "jack of all trades" of the legendary Hungarian theatre of New York; János Oláh, poet, editor in chief of Magyar Napló; Margit Borgulya, chief head restorer of the Hungarian National Gallery; Péter Molnár, graphic artist and animator; Hondromatidisz Rigasz, Greek-Hungarian sculptor; Éva Oláh Áré, sculptor living in Milan; László Polgár, sculptor living in Manhattan; Laci Petrovics, Gyuri Kempf and the wonderful, infinitely modest professor Bandi Koppány graduated from and now teach at the Industrial Arts College. And, of course, Krisztina Kókay, painter, graphic artist and gobelin artist. I am saddened to tell you that Gyuri Kempf and Hondromatidisz Rigasz have both departed from this life and now work on the Elysian fields. I have to stop short this roll call, because it is proper for me to speak in praise of Kriszti Kókay now. The inspired state means silence, the searching for beauty, the magnificent work of creation. Krisztina Kókay's wandering on the snow-white sheet is similar to the work of the ancient ploughman. Pencil or pen in hand, she sits at a table, the outside world ceases to exist, and she draws small lines on the paper. Holding her tool this way or that, the result is the map of a Never Existing Empire. Trees, forests, rocks and towers are born here. Through labyrinths, flights of stairs and gates - the thread is unreeling - we get out on the meadow, the plateau, the sunshine. We are standing by the mountain lake with the canopy of the infinite blue sky above us. In my view, this work is a blood brother of another kind of work, of stone cutting. If I work the stone with a flat chisel, the visible result is a series of small, short lines on the surface of the stone. Countless tiny lines follow each other, and this is where the logic of the drawing is revealed. I "draw" the stone with a chisel for weeks or months. I create a shape in the space. The same things can be told about Kókay's graphic works, with the difference that she touches pencil or pen to the plane of the white sheet. A space is created, but on the plane. The illusion of creation improves to become reality on her drawings and gobelins. Order is born as a function of time and at the end of the operation the work of art is presented. The drawing is ready. Kókay practices the art of graphics on the same high level as she practices the art of making gobelins.
