Ván Hajnalka (szerk.): Bepillantás a kintbe. Kolozsváry-Stupler Éva művészete - Munkácsy Mihály Múzeum Közleményei 9. (Békéscsaba, 2017)
Ván Hajnalka: Bepillatnás a kintbe
29 Mythological Apparition 2001 Mixed Media 41” x 16” x 30" bones, themselves a natural material. I vividly recall her high degree of excitement in Rome, a city so filled with great art, upon visiting the ossuary chapels of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappucchini, in which the bones of several thousand friars are arranged in decorative patterns. The fact that this church is on the Via Veneto, famous for its living performance of vanity every evening, only intensifies the sense of finitude that overwhelms those who may not have the comfort of a belief in an afterlife. Sometimes Eva will combine bones with mannequins, producing figures with the body of a person and the skeletal head of an animal. This combination produces a monstrosity, related to the kind of monsters that appear during Goya’s The Sleep of Reason. And Reason has rarely, until now, slept as deeply as during her childhood, a period of fear and hiding that produced a lasting trauma. Eva’s assemblages do not consist purely of unmodified found objects. She has no qualms about subtly painting into them or adding elements that she sculpts, both realistically and ex- pressionistically. For the sculpted elements, she uses a kind of clay that can be hardened by baking in a conventional kitchen oven. I never know, when peeking into the oven at home, whether I’ll find a casserole of rakott krumpli, a row of homunculi, or a very convincing eye staring back at me. Eyes are ubiquitous in Eva’s works. They are by no means a clichéd, ultra-feminist reaction to the male gaze; Eva’s strong feminist convictions have never veered toward a hostility to men in general. Rather, they function as the eye of the artist looking out from the work of art. Seeing is, of course, the dominant sense for the visual artist, and placing a realistically-rendered eye within the work produces the effect that the viewer is making eye contact directly with the artwork and, by extension, with the artist. This effect takes on an intensified poignancy in such a work as Insight, where the freshness of the eye is in strong contrast with the aged fragility of the camera box, an instance where juxtaposition adds to meaning. The camera here does not partake of a Sontagian distancing; rather, with the eye looking back at you, it confuses the distinction between subject and object. The eye or camera is on occasion added to by a no longer ticking watchwork, a strong reminder of one’s inescapable finitude. At times they are tied up in a spiderlike mesh of cords, reducing the artist/artwork’s kinetic possibilities. As long as she/it can see, however, the connection to the
