Eliost, Karen (szerk.): Szombathy. Városjelek 1971 - 2012. Művészet Malom, Szentendre, 2012. szeptember 28 - november 11. (Szentendre, 2012)

A város törlődő jelei

When confronted with a photograph of a painted-over poster we might be inclined to fantasise about a revolutionary gesture or expression of political meaning that has been deliberately covered up with a brutal daubing of paint. Perhaps before, a combustible line of 1970s operarist graffiti could be read on the walls of an Italian city, before the authorities ordered it covered up lest the ideological contamination spread? More prosaically, it could have been a boring election poster of a smiling and corrupt politician, removed after the event to comply with local regulations. Exposed to the whole series of white washed public messages, our interest shifts from what might have disappeared to what has been created in the process of its disappearing.

From the formal treatment of these cases of urban over-painting, and despite the temptation to imagine all kinds of possible political subtexts, it is clear that Szombathy is most profoundly concerned here not with specific cases of erasure, but with the general problem of the wiping away of meaning, as manifested in over-painting as a microdisruption of the visual order of public space. The fast decay of collective and individual memories of socialism and post-socialism has indeed been a recurrent preoccupation of the artist.4 While he has dealt with these questions using particular cases and through other media, such as performance, the problem of the over-writing of history is tackled in these series at a more refined and abstract level.

In many cases the over-painting he observes did not take place only once, since there are layer upon layer of paint of different colours and even blank sheets glued over posters that were stuck on previous blank sheets erasing even older posters, so that the dumb walls remain silent about a micro-history that has been subject to overlapping impulses to produce and extinguish meaning. This could even be taken as a loose metaphor for the onion skins of history of Eastern Europe, in which each new victor has expertly rewritten collective remembrance by reordering its visual representation in public space.

With the framing of the scene by the camera, what we have is no longer just an overpainted flyer on a forgotten urban surface; rescued from neglect by the eye of the camera, new forms, possibilities and questions gradually appear. While the latent connections to the abstract painting of the classical avant-garde come straight to mind as the viewer moves from image to image absorbing the repetition of monochrome four-sided figures, in the uneven surfaces, occasions of coincidental pastiche and greying pastels there are also intimations of messier post-war fashions for art brut and neo-expressionism. To discover and frame modernist painterly gestures created by chance in the urban environment could even belong to a super extended understanding of contemporary painting.

Another facet of these painted erasures is their relationship to the architecture that they intrude upon. These coloured or colourless surfaces are uncared for, as are many of the buildings that provide their accidental backdrop, with crumbling concrete, mortarless brickwork and unidentifiable features contributing to the sense of urban decay. It would not be hard to detect in the dejected architecture echoes of the artist’s strong views about the spiritual torture of provincial life in communist Eastern Europe, as expressed in his Carbonising series of charcoal drawings from 1969 about suicidal urges in Subotica.5 The decay of the buildings, washed out wrinkliness of the posters,

4 Notably in performances such as 'Flags 2’ from 1995 dealing with the breakup and memory of Socialist Yugoslavia, see: Szombathy Art, 108.

5 Ibid., 10.

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