Hann Ferenc: Paulovics. Kántor Lajos és Kocsis István írásaival (A PMMI kiadványai. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, 2008)

Hann Ferenc - The artist's career: an overview

(Szentendre, 1997-) In the mid 1990s, the artist was considering moving 'home', to a cultural, linguistic, emotional, spiritual homeland that cannot be divided by state borders. He has chosen Szentendre by the Danube, turned into a 'painters'town' by the old generation of Nagybánya painters and Jenő Barcsay from the Mezőség region of Transylvania. He decided to leave his reliable Iserlohn and Barendorf clientele, with his microscopic world, containing furniture and objects from Szatmár, which was described in detail by Lajos Kántor. In Szentendre, his artistic work continues without any major break, although it produces some new features. The lyrical abstract non-figurative attitude turns into a noticeably figurative one, or at least ;

nto one that evokes a psychological mood while preserves some palpable signs {Mood on the Danube, 2003; Galaxy series, 2004; Moonshadow, 2005). The real novelty is, however, the appearance of landscape in his work. As a young man, he could see Oszkár Nagy and András Mikola working on the bank of the Zazar in Nagybánya, and could touch the canvases of the old, grumpy painter, Sándor Ziffer in his studio. It is probably in Szentendre, however, that he considered landscape as a theme for the first time. The paintings he made during this period in great number are characterized by strong movements and excited brushwork (Street with stairs, 2002; Hilltop, 2007), by moderate cubism (Roofs on the Pismány, 2003) or by an attention paid to the inner structure of the view (Landscape structure, 2007;. Recently, the artist has painted numerous still lifes, which show no similarity with the form-analyzing, laconic but mysterious object groups of his early Szatmár period. The picture area is filled with vivid spots of burning red, ochre and blue, slipping into each other, and with Chrysanthemums, bunches of autumn flowers beside a bottle or some neutral form. Despite the changes in his oeuvre, the artist has remained faithful to two main features for about half a century. First, he has continued the series of his India ink drawings made mostly on large (usually 70x50 cm) sheets up to the present; second, he has been expanding his collector of portraits depicting masters whom he felt close to himself. On these sensitive portraits, he has often used mixed techniques.