Kókay Krisztina textilművész (Esztergom, 1995)
DRAWING AND TEXTILE János Oláh A vulnerable and insecure personality has always had to muster a degree oKaudacity to express himself as an artists. Audacity is a dubious term when referring to Krisztina Kókay. She accepts the risks involved in making a drastically personal statement with quiet resignation and natural serenity. The directness with which she expresses and conveys the fusing between her internal qualities and artistic possibilities is galvanizing. Which is perhaps why drawing is so important to her. It is not a tool of depiction or portrayal but a direct account of her internal state. Her drawings are reminiscent of electrocardiograms, not just visually but in their essence. Everything is stated in the simplest expression, though with a resonant line. Gossamer and lyrical, her drawing is averse to any stated creed, nothing is transposed or depicted, there is no ideology or lure art theory. It does not want to be except what it is. Drawing is the most personal sphere of art, a genre comparable to the literary diary. The visual diary comprising these drawings deflects its light back on the artist who made it, through a multiple spectrum which yet is void of stylistic alteration. The viewer appears to step into what seems at first a forthright world. A line reflecting insecurity yet a generous sweep of the hand, the power of the touch and gentility of tone, and the whiteness of the paper. Nothing more. Their balance and the loss of it gives birth to the motifs, fine internal lines like the ripples in silk or netting or the surface of the water, tangled webs borne on a breath of wind. The surfaces are familiar from that moment between two feelings or two actions. Those feelings once expressed, those actions once executed, shatter the surfaces. They know nothing about abstract and composed order, just as the visual world with its set of own rules is alien to them. The shading and the left-out whiteness of the paper are only supplementary tools; the drawings' spirit is the line with its vulnerability and irregularity, the evocation of a silent drama of defenselessness come out of expression and concealment. It evokes a secret, the enigma of existence thet is the property of all things living, but which no one can explain. The large canvases are from a drawn pictorial world, but there are transpositions that transfer these fine signals into symbols. They project mostly onto walls. The walls are never real. They are immaterial and floating. They always display a rift. It may be a fine crask or an actual gate, caved in a little window, the gateway to another world. A world not seen only sensed. Present all at once are the blue of forgiveness, the beast devouring a new princess every night, the magic horse flying over seven globes in one swooping stride, and other never really comprehended props of mythic consciousness. It is all very mysterious, and still, the seemingly familiar things of the world on this side of the beyond are no more than that. All the while they may rest on misunderstandings no end. There is just one certainty: the wall that divides. It divides just as it connects. Like the wall of a cell that makes life itself possible by being partially passable. The wall stands between one entiry and another, between inside and outside, past and present, civilization and its fall, remembrance and forgetting. It evokes intricate patterns of rough-hewn chunks of stone in the Mycenean labyrinth, or the smoke-covered, unrestored mosaic firmament in the early-Christian chapel at Ravenna, the cracked, dried-out ground, the face of the Indian Earth-God, the crammed rows of corns on the cob, or the honeycomb-like cells of a living body. The effect is a vibration between extremes. At first its seems monumental, but really it lives in the finest details. It alludes to permanence rooted in myths while radiating the corruptible transience of childhood drawings etched into the sand. The image recalls the viewer into the landscapes of genesis, evoking visions everyone many times a day nourishes in dreams, remembrances and the imagination. But now he may feel that he confronts them for the first time on paper, the canvas, or silk.
