Kopin Katalin (szerk.): Test objektív. A test reprezentációja a kortárs művészetben - Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, C. sorozat: Katalógusok 5. (Szentendre, 2013)

Spectators can encounter loneliness, chosen or inevitable solitude, a human being doomed to roam while existing outside of time and space in the paintings by László Fehér, György Jovián and Márta Czene.

The female figure depicted by Márta Czene is glowing in a depressing dark space. The painting based on strong light/shadow contrast has two focal points: a young woman and a bed covered with a sheet, placed diagonally in space. The female figure is brought forward from the pressing dark space by the power of light, leaving behind the limitations of closed space and the bed referring to passivity. The statuesque, motionless female figure is standing on the edge of the foreshortened room as a caryatid holding invisible burdens, ready to move on and leave behind her fetters. The contemplative, unworldly female figure creates a closed universe.

György Jovián’s themes include the lonely man and his distressed environment, the human body, which evokes aversion rather than pity, and the empty space, the vacuum-like loneliness he created around himself. In Jovián’s pictorial universe, reality is never merciful: the surface of the human body is dissected by grazing lights; the face is furrowed by blood vessels, creases and wrinkles. The body consists of mouldering, dying surfaces; it is nothing more than lifeless material. Sitting in an Orwellian setting, a man is watching in complete apathy the flames shooting next to him, which can either refer to the final doom, or can be interpreted as a jet of flame of hope.

In László Fehér’s self-portrait, a figure is floating on the surface of water, in a state of weightlessness, unaffected by physical laws and gravity. The grey tones and different shades of black render the atmosphere sinister and depressing. The solitude evoked by the total exclusion of the external world has a rather pressing than liberating effect on the floating and helplessly drifting body.

All three paintings attempt to find the possibilities for the visualisation of the human body. However, the depicted environment is more than a mere scene. It carries psychic contents, as the soul is projected on it.