Gulyás Katalin et al. (szerk.): Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 21. (Szolnok, 2012)
Művészettörténet - Gurzó K. Enikó: A lírai és a geometrikus absztrakció találkozása Hamza D. Ákos képzőművészetében
TISICUM XXI. - MŰVÉSZETTÖRTÉNET Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery http://americanart.si.edu/ Terminartors www.terminartors.com WebMuseum, Paris http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/ Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia Gurzó K. Enikő Spirit and geometric form: Dezső Ákos Hamza and the avant-garde Established for over four decades in Brasil, Dezső Ákos Hamza did not return to Hungary until after 1989. During this entire period, the painter has worked and deepened the initial experiences of his homeland. On the other hand, he has tried to adapt, with as few losses as possible, to the dynamic space of the French and Brazilian artistic climate and that of the occidental art market, both of which are definitely of economic nature and unforgivable to the undecided. In a certain way, Hamza has lived simultaneosly in two realities. The eastern one, strongly motivated historically and circumstantially to preserve the internal coherence and human specifications by means of the symbolic projection and spiritual aspiration. And the western one, marked by post-industrialism, where museum quality values and hedonistic annotations have gravely lost their authority, being replaced through specific economical mechanisms, by unconventional concerns and numerous experiments directly connected to the new materials and technologies. In this kind of environment, where the profound hostility towards the usual symbolic horizon is undisputable, Hamza has been insistently and consciously looking for solid arguments of his own. Through the 1920s and the 1930s, he was part of the new artistic movement sweeping across Europe, a revolutionary movement in which representational and story-telling art was jettisoned in favour of the abstract, primordial, elemental. Functional design for mass production and mass distribution was seen as a means of repairing the devastating social damage done by war. This was the brilliantly iconoclastic period in which Mondrian and Van Doesburg were pursing the objective harmonies of rectangles and primary colours in their paintings, and Gabo was conceiving his constructivist monument to the industrial revolution. Returning to Hungary after 1989, Hamza reconnected to the original space of his art. But he has also rediscovered the institutional practices and the contradictory behaviour from which he had been disconnected during the entire period of his exile. Hamza’s reception in this country was not an open-armed one. Even so- called modernists found him baffling, the boiler-suited technocrat with the magnificent grin. His sheer versatility was suspect in a country where they liked you to be one thing or another. Painter, sculptor, film-maker, poet, politician, freemason, journalist, syndicate leader: what was Hamza not? Dezső Ákos Hamza’s art is an impressive and convincing illustration of his search for a horizon where yesterday’s symbol and today’s artist can look each other in the eye. What we have so far tried to sketch concerning the paradoxical avant-garde of retrieving the traditional landmarks within post-modernity can be found directly in the stages of Hamza's art. His artistic discourse grants the symbolic world its immediate aspect, palpable, accesible, mysterious and fascinating at the same time. Contemplating for instance his geometrical drawings, the infinite diversity resulting from the combination of the same lines, yet eternally different, the depth suggested by the circles swirling within the squares and thus transforming an angular structure symbolizing a well- established limit into a vertical vibration, a gimlet breaking the opacity of historical time - all these visual experiences Dezső Ákos Hamza mediates come in face from the ancestral memory of signs, of those fundamental beauties forgotten in a time of technology and urban human abasement. (translated by the Author) 336
