Klemmné Németh Zsuzsa (szerk.): Triznya Mátyás 1922 - 1991 (Szentendre-Zebegény, 2012)

Although swarms of tourists from all over the world are attracted by some invisible power to flock to the Colosseum, Piazza Navona, the Capitolium and all the other well-known places of Rome day by day, very few of them understand what they are looking for in this ageless city, which never tries to hide its decay.

Pondering about the Colosseum, Miklós Hubay words what we can feel when we observe Mátyás Triznyas aquarelles: “The Colosseum: in its form is an extinct crater, a squirt on the Moon. I looked from its bottom, up to its rim - my nothingness became as obvious as that of an astronaut left on an alien planet. I tried to imagine one hundred thousands of onlookers around. Can so many people make the whirl ofstones more human, from the depth of which — like from a deep well — one can see the stars? No, they cannot. The crowded Colosseum might remain an even more lifeless crater of the moon. The more people flock inside the more distant, inconceivable and unlikely human presence becomes. ”5 Perhaps this is why Mátyás Triznya did not paint people among the buildings in the shadow of trees. This idea also appears in the poem written to Mátyás Triznya by Ferenc Szabó, which is at the head of their joint volume:

“Though no man you see, alive

is the spirit of wells, gardens and stones

at the bottom of broken columns

evanescence meditates

light flows like golden blessing

in the open palm of pine trees”6

(rough translation)

5 Miklós Hubay: A közöny gyújtópontjában, Napló nélkülem, Szépirodalmi Kiadó, Budapest, 1978. p.ioo

6 Mielőtt szürkülnek a színek, Ferenc Szabós poems, Mátyás Triznyas aquarelles, Rome, 1987, p.5

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