Kolozsváry Marianna szerk.: Lossonczy Tamás festőművész kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2009/6)

a single, almost enraged impulse have also grown fewer. They are present, however, and the enraged impulse is apparently prompted not only by the spontaneity of the painterly gesture, but also by the struggle with the obstacles to this spontaneity and the resistance of the body, determined by age. Work in the studio is ever more difficult, and work bound to the sketching board held in his lap tends to dominate over work bound to a desk. His eyesight is failing, and is limited to bright times of the day and conditions of strong lighting. The dulling of the senses limits the written and verbal communication that is so important. Simultaneously this is the period - as participants in the aged artist's exhibition openings have witnessed - of public statements, laconic formulations, and pronouncements concerning the order of the world, culture and the laws of ethos. The formal makeup of his works is also laconic and confined to essentials. This tendency, which could be described as minimalism (not of course in stylistic terms), is the continuation of every principle rooted in his personal biography. Where sight fails, gesture substitutes. Form exists not only in the eye, but in the series of motions practiced through drawing - does this perhaps reveal in retrospect one of the essential fundamentals of his art? In a similar manner, we can observe that the use of construction tools of geometry and previously elaborated patterns in the precise evocation of certain forms and symmetries can help surmount the deficiencies of the senses. The patterns themselves appear unmediated, in the colorful, planar shapes of collages and the spatiality created through their contrasts and overlaps. His "paper sculptures" are immediate manifestations of the spatiality of the collages, and simultaneously proofs of triumph over limited creativity and the compulsion to address problems by every means. The expression collage-sculptures might be a more fitting term, as it would reveal the true origin of their spatiality. The basic case of this spatiality is the colorful base - "background" - and - "in front of it" the composition reduced to the dualism of the relief base and the motif. The base is often already given: colored cardboard, drawing-paper or a canvas with a colored base, the reduction resides in the artist's concentration on the motif and the gesture of its creation (the various modes of applying paint: continuous lines, dotting and hatching, dissolving into the plane, or appearing as if tangible). This is a game with rules always to be determined, rules that refer to the quality of the composition, the symmetries, or the lack thereof. Even the technical apparatus of his game recalls children's drawings: collages of drawings done with black and colored pencils, pastels, ink and pen, felt-tip pen, and the omnipresent tearing and cuttings, often including the use of an earlier work as an articulated surface. Perhaps old age returns to the world of childhood? Possibly in its pureness and simplicity (and this is hardly foreign to the ideal of spontaneity of surrealism), but by no means in its deliberateness. If the historical prototypes of the aged painter were characterized by increasing concentration on the essence, in the case of Lossonczy this idea is manifested in the quest for elemental forms. By now he cares for nothing other than art itself. He is beyond the one-time ideological and aesthetic debates: nothing remains but concreteness, which once constituted the rallying cry of abstraction. Inspired as he may be by the fraying strands of memories of one-time academic courses on figure drawing or by geometric figures, plastic forms, visions, and the image traces of the great masters of the 20th century, anything that is part of the world of art can serve as a source. He no longer knows boundaries or timidity, neither when it comes to sincere self-exposure nor with respect to the recollection of sources of inspiration, since they all appear as part and symbol of a single culture and civilization the passing of which (the transformation into history of which) he is witness to, and to whose fate he has vehemently tied his own existence. He knows this, he experiences it, and even bound to his room and chair, he cannot avoid this experience: our era is no longer the world of art; his, however, became a world of art once a long time ago, and has remained a world of art to this day. This can best be learned from him. He draws everyday, as the ancients taught. Once the foundations of the autonomy of art were laid on drawing, and this skill made the artist an artist. Now his spirit is kept alive by the principle of nulla dies sine linea. He says he works much as the bird sings. Also that he works in his head, in a state of dreaming wakefulness, awakening in his dreams, and waiting to draw again while sitting in his chair. He has a habit of complementing the series of works with commentary and titles offering summaries, sometimes startling, critical, and blunt titles that refer to far more than mere aesthetic problems and sometimes are almost reminiscent of the world of caricatures. This too is a return to an earlier practice (or it is a habit), one he made use of in the period following the World War as well. Characters emerge: occasionally deformed shapes, time and again the offspring of surrealist imagination, other times geometric shapes no less endowed with character, then with a single sweep a womanly line caresses, rather than circumscribes, the forms. Loving, hitting, striking and abusing them. No doubt the practice of drawing gestures, which keep the creative imagination alive and are at the same time expressions of a boundless claim for communication. Messages whose personal quality is proven by the signature his works almost always bear. I espied the following sentence on a strap holding together a day's bundle of sketches: "Not continue to live for as much as a minute more / howl and sob / weep and wail." Let no one think that art crowns old age. It merely gives it meaning.