Heves megyei aprónyomtatványok 8/I
fronted his very paintings with photography, namely realizing the social role of photography he reduced his large-sized realistic paintings emphatically to two dimensions and gray, and stiffened them to banal sections. Hyperrealist artists taking part in the exhibition have long ago transgressed the "heureca" level represented by Lak- ner in the late 60ies. The illusionism of Ádám KÉRI's banal objects gets a special function just in the context of photography: the reproduction melts the dividing lines between reality and artificial depiction to such a degree that we tend to regard a commodity object as one of Kéri's works. László MÉHES who used also to paint after photography on the other hand achieves photo-effect in his recent works through an almost sculpturesque mechanic depiction which he combines with the principle of transparency. It is just the transparency of his draperies which marks the basic novelty compared to the "pseudo" principle elaborated 5—6 years before by Gyula PAUER — namely, the first materializations of this theory marking the beginning of a new era were also illusionistic surfaces: "quasi-photos" achieved also by a mechanical process. They were quasiphotos in the sense like the air-brush paintings of Man Ray, which directly preceded rayograms — and this metaphor might help to understand the significance I attach to the prints of Péter LEGÉNDY imitating microscopic exposures (actually being subjected to some kind of simple heat effect), or to the unfixed prints of ERDÉLY in the revival of the genre of photogram. There is no particular sense in any kind of classification of the material collected, namely all of them basically belong to a single group, which is charaterized by medium-orientedness: these works could be created only by photo (or in dose connection to it), or if carried by an other medium, their yvhole meaning would change. Even artists seemingly transplanting some earlier theme of theirs to photography (BAK, CSIKY, GÁYOR, MAJOR, TÓT, TÜRK) attach a crucial significance to the altered way of documentation. For Csiky photograph is also a sculpture, Gáyor's "amphigrams" have to become transparent on photograph. If we observe the more frequently occuring themes the groups formed this way are perpetually overlapping each other — on the other hand they all prove to be essentially "medial" problem raisings. Several of them deal with the phenomenon of reflection, for example: BIRKÁS, HAJAS, JOVÁNOVICS, KÁROLYI - and by no accident since we cannot avoid the examination of the old metaphor: "art is the reflection of reality". But what kind of reflected image is photo? — the question already relates to the medium, and the question of its objectivity is again inseparable from it (FI- CZEK, HÁMOS, MAURER, VETŐ). Or let us take a look at the factor of time for the representation of which photography seems to be especially fit. Which example informs us more objectively of the nature of time: "Time travel" covering decades or the inconceivably short projectile impact thus becoming a fantastic plastic work (both: ERDÉLY), the crabbed photograph becoming smoke—like (BARANYAY), or the regularly fixed, but in each instant motionless view (HARIS)?
