Zágorec-Csuka Judit: Gábor Zoltán festőművész portréja (Lendva, 2002)
Részletek Gábor Zoltán prózai műveiből
coes decorating the Conference Room in Lendava's City Hall building, Gábor was able to fulfill his long-standing childhood wish to someday do what Árpád Feszty had done: paint important historical moments of his people and home. His three-part fresco in Hotel Lipa, "Battle with the Turks," also contains historical connotations; two other interesting frescoes in Lendava are in private collections: "The Naturalization of the Grape Vine" and "Ave Maria." In addition to the above-mentioned, the artist painted numerous frescoes in Croatia. Most of them were rendered in the secco technique, several, however, in sgrafitto. The author of the monograph, Judit Zágorec-Csuka, touches upon the major moments of significance in the artist's life, his basic thoughts, ethical, literary and spiritual views, and presents them to the reader in the most spontaneous manner - the interview. Although Gábor has been living in Zagreb for 60 years and spent only his earliest days in Lendava; he was, nonetheless, strongly bound to the town by myriad events, people, memories and, ultimately, artistic works. Here lived the friends of his youth, related spirits, he calls them: painter Lajos Pandur, sculptor Sándor Schulteisz, poets Lajos Vlaj and Kálmán Dudás. Gábor's Hungarian/Croatian identity has accompanied him his entire life. Having learned Croatian on a literary level, he writes and translates in that language. Although disappointments were not lacking, he never experienced chauvinism in Croatia toward his Hungarian origin. National partisanship played no part in his life. To the contrary, he chooses friends and judges people not by their national adherence or whether they seem better, superior or inferior, but simply whether they are good or bad. He criticizes any sort of nationalism or politicizing over national adherence and exclusiveness, for he witnessed the violent death of too many friends, acquaintances and neighbors of Jewish origin, and those losses left him deeply distressed. He despises Fascism, Communism and Nationalism, declaiming them as ideologies used by individuals or groups whose final goal is always the same: money. Experience has made him both pessimistic and atheistic, for much evil has been committed in the name of religion. Still today it is the source of misery, advantage taking, wars and iniquity, and he no longer believes in God. He only believes in friendship, but even that with reserve. In his opinion, love often turns into hate, or, in the best of cases, into friendship. Nor does he like the word "intellectual," saying that it is generally the child of snobbism. His disappointment in Homo Sapiens, who constantly fight and destroy, is immense. A bureaucratic mentality, greed and political corruption, the disdain for and humiliation of the human soul, feelings of exclusion, these are frequent themes in his paintings, like "Trampled Flower" and "Butterfly on the Run." Abuse and contempt for human dignity are every day occurrences everywhere, also there, where God is called upon and vainglorious, pompously decorated churches are built, yet funds are not made available to homes for the aged or to hospitals. He, himself, would like to be a butterfly on the run. Oppression is 160
