Gaál comes to and from, between this world and the world hereafter, the conscious and the subconscious, perhaps he is never realising when he passes the so-called “delicately built bridge” as Hölderlin wrote.
He first exhibited wooden heads covered with leather in 1996. Following the first series, he maintained a free passage between painting and sculpture. While the Gaálian leitmotif, the metaphorical mask, the condensed image of the true self, frequently gives the impression of being a means of disguise in his paintings, the camouflage-like elements become an integral part of the head-sculptures. His heads make faces—faces made of strips of leather, joined together with mud and nails.
The artist refers to them as gnomes or as Marsyas, the mythological hero. Gaál’s grimacing heads suggest that their simple looks conceal secret knowledge. The story of Marsyas, who was flayed alive, is a mythical paradigm of vivisection. The way as Gaál overlay the wooden heads with leather strips, this is a kind of vivisection backwards. The leather is a skin that is why the sculptures are shocking us, we feel the pain, the painful birth of the wooden heads. Their mouths are always open, they gasp for breath or whisper or shout, the spirit comes and goes, in and out of them.
But Gaál’s head has another story to it. The leather strips and the mud express the origins and fragility of our human nature; the nails, seem to be stigmas, represent the everyday human passion story. The magical materials constituting the sculptures live on in our minds like “memories.” The artist’s personal experience, former village life, the no longer used objects of a disappearing culture get a new function, a new life, and assume their final form in the transcendent world of art.
Katalin T. Nagy