Sz. Varga Ágnes KABÓ: MEGNYÍLÓ FÉNYTEREK (Kiállítási katalógusok - Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2006)

TOWARDS OPENING LIGHTSPACES • Although living and working in Pomáz since the middle of the 1980s, Ágnes Sz. Varga Kabó is an artist of Szentendre, as she was born in the city and she got her first significant impressions in Szentendre. Her character, her creating personality were developing here. Her memories, ideals and friends, artist-relations bind her mainly to Szentendre. That is why it is almost statutory that the suggestive visual elements - crowded, zigzag streets, yards, roofs, late-Baroque and Classicist churches, calvaries, crosses, architectural motives with Mediterranean atmosphere - of the small town, which had been built and rebuilt from its ruins from the Middle Ages influenced the artist, who was searching the truth. In the last few years a turn can be traced in her art, as the main characteristic of her latest pictures, drawn with coal, graphite and crayon is the meditative subsidence. Her present pictures are not rooted in the upsetting memories of the visual world but in the deep contemplation turning its back on the painful visions and the silent soul's search, roaming in dark pits, wishing light. To be more precise, Sz. Varga creates, as if she would see with closed eyes an imaginary new world, without subject, searching its subject, opening from the inside. Her look is like that of a man playing blind, casting away his sight, who compresses - with the condensed projection of his inner life the essence of the relation between the individual and the universal reality seeming complex into a variation of a basic vision, coming back again and again. So she visions and moves the deepest secrets of her thoughts, feelings, soul, making one universe into a poetic picture, which can be generalised into an empty, space-time situation with a naked topic. It is like someone sitting in his/her own dark room, trying to define and understand his/her situation and place in the universe. So during her contemplations without pictures, her brooding, which focuses on God or an inner fire she cuts holes on the wall of darkness, louring as an existentialist mystery to find understandable help to be able to come out of the prison. Through the holes, mysterious lights come to the blind subconscious, whose flashing hanks and beaming lights in geometrical forms pervade the deepest corners of the soul's shafts. Looming rooms, uncanny spaces expand before her, windows and doors open to breaches, through which the spiritual soul can set off towards the mysterious light as destination. The Sz. Varga picture is neither a sooty window, whose velvet has a breach through which the real world can be seen; nor a tarry mirror, into whose surface we can draw a line, through which parts of his/her own face look back. The Kabó-picture does not describe, depict or reflect the details of the delusional world's phenomena outside us, but frees the real, direct, essential knowledge as an essential metaphor. The Kabó-picture is like an initiation object, initiating the depth of the vital secrets. It is like a medium, directing our sight, character and spiritual soul to the final scene's stage. It is like an undeniable spiritual adventure, which takes care of the soul's accurate arrival to the destination. It is like a seditious deliverer, who activates our desire to experience the seeing step by step, the final meeting without circumlocution. The nature of the Kabó-picture is two-fold, like that of the shadow, where the light comes from the front, from behind the black aura. This light glows yellow, red and orange just like the purgatory or the flames of hell. It also glows as golden wool like the angel hair bending to the meadow. It radiates the space behind the door, which is left ajar; just like the electricity on the picture of Csontváry - called Power station of Jejce at night - radiating the station itself. Sometimes it is just looming from the mysterious space, just like at the time of lunar eclipse.... Tihamér Novotny 4