It is a rare occasion, both an excitement and an honour in the life of a gallery, when it can present a selection of a part of a life’s work that has already been closed, but is still little known in Hungary, despite its extraordinary quality and richness, and contribute to the wider knowledge of the artist, according to its intentions and possibilities.
Inda Gallery is now in the fortunate position of presenting paintings, fire enamel works and painted wood sculptures from the life of János Antal Kazinczy, who was born in Timisoara in 1914 and died in 2008 in Violés, France, after a life full of turns and twists, from the period from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
Having started his studies in drawing and engraving in his hometown at the age of eleven, Kazinczy became a student of Gyula Rudnay at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest at the age of 18. In 1935 he had to return to Romania for military service, and from 1938 he lived and worked in Sibiu. His early paintings of Transylvanian landscapes and people were destroyed in a bomb attack in Bucharest during the Second World War. From the end of 1944 he worked for nearly a year as editor-in-charge of the Hungarian Word, published in Timisoara, and in 1947 he fled to Hungary to escape arrest for his political role in the Hungarian People’s Alliance.
In 1949 he started teaching at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts and in the same year he became the editor-in-charge of Free Art. He was dismissed from the college in 1950 for his decadent and formalist art, but kept his editorial post until 1953. In the ’56 revolution, his studio was severely damaged and his works destroyed. In 1957, he left Hungary with his then eleven-year-old son, living and working first briefly in Austria, then in Germany, then in Rocbaron in the south of France from 1967, in Vacqueyras from 1995 and in Violés until his death in 2008.
The works now on show were all made in France between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. Non-figurative paintings, sculptures, fire enamels. The compositions are mostly based on light, vivid ground, but even when the shades are darker, the surfaces are still vivid, with organic shapes and lines in their playful geometry, bringing the surfaces to life. Shapes painted on wood or Japanese paper in a vivid egg tempera sometimes have lines of tassels running through them, or cacophony. In the abstract forms of paintings, painted wood sculptures and enamels, landscapes, fragmented layers of earth, small animals, unicellular organisms, aquatic plants, the mysterious blueness of the starry sky, the body and strings of an instrument, or a scene pulsating in the contours of a vehicle, are revealed.