Szilasi Ágota, H.: Országos Akvarell Triennálé. P. Szabó Ernő művészettörténész (1952-2018) emlékére (Eger, 2018)

P. Szabó Ernő: Előszó az 50 éves évfordulóját ünneplő egri akvarell tárlathoz

reason the art of watercolour is often referred to as the hardest genre of painting: when colours are put down on the paper quickly and dry fast, later alterations are not possible. In our age, however, things are different: although today, naturally, you can still see artworks made outdoors, alla prima, grasping the evanescent experience, but their number is falling, and as aquarelle was aiming to express more and more complex and up-to-date contents, it was enlarging the range of its tools too. The use of gouache, tempera, ink, walnut stain, colour chalk and pencil got established in watercolour painting long ago, and today, as the exhibits of this triennial show, it is able to integrate even newer tools and techniques including ecoline paintings and twigs, enamel and installation.

One could get the most information about the current status of watercolour from the series of exhibitions of the biennials - triennials from 2009 -, launched 50 years ago in 1968. The Hungarian watercolour, as it were, became the ground for artistic experimentation during the decades of the biennials. Applying new materials and tools, crossing the borders between genres and the démocratisation of different fields resulted, simultaneously with the number of ..clean" watercolours decreasing, in the application of mixed techniques enriching the ways of expression within the genre. In the 80s - mostly as an influence of New Painting - sizes began to grow, and in the following two decades watercolour painting outgrew the two dimensions stepping into the space as a part of installations hung in the exhibition space or put on the floor. There were a number of exciting works born that use new elements and solutions, combining them with the traditional English tools of aquarelle. Paradoxically, this does not question, but quite contrary, reinforces the positions of watercolour painting. As written by Ágota H.Szilasi, the curator of this event series a fewyears ago, "most importantly, with water soluble paints and the materials that can be combined with them, artists can actually obtain freedom, a set of tools of expression and impression that few traditional painting or graphic techniques can provide. As a result, there is an amazing variety of style - so many artists so many specific languages."

Actually, the fact that Hungarian aquarelle art has become so multicoloured by the beginning of the third millennium is in a great part due to the work which has been done by the Society of Hungarian Watercolorists in the past period. It has been over two decades ago that they organised their first exhibition titled "Coloured water", and since then they have been inviting applications regularly in different themes, or collecting the most outstanding or even the most experimenting works from the latest pieces of watercolour painting. All this - besides the members' enthusiasm of course - is due to the dedicated work of the Society's leaders, among them the artist Géza Szily as its long-serving president who