István Pető’s exhibition Double Visage is the second solo show of the artist, who has been living and working in Paris for more than forty years, at the Várfok Gallery. After beginning his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts and continuing them at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he spent a year in New York at the end of the 1990s. In line with his international career, he has exhibited in France, Belgium, Argentina, Taiwan, and the United States, among other countries. Beyond important private collections, his works can also be found in public collections in France, including Paris, as well as in Hungary and Taiwan. Alongside painting, a wide range of graphic techniques – such as lithography and various methods of etching – also play a crucial role in his art.
The exhibition presents two of the artist’s most recent series. After his early works with figurative starting points, marked by line-based yet expressive and partly abstract approaches, a naturally proliferating world of forms emerged in his oeuvre as the turn of the millennium approached. In his series Garden, Now, developed over nearly a decade – without resorting to direct representation – he captured metaphorical inner gardens on airy canvases as well as on unique and editioned works on paper. Several of these works, not previously shown in Hungary, are also included in the present exhibition.
This long-term, consistently developed series is further elaborated in his cycle entitled Possible Gardens. In these works, the organic and sensual visuality, at times fragile in its linearity and at other times composed of intense patches, appears in a less soft, less pastel-like color range. Replacing the more natural, bluish and greenish compositions of the earlier series, we now encounter predominantly strong yellow paintings, often highlighted with softer hues and accents of red or blue. Despite their complete abstraction, the vibrating, almost radiating canvases may easily evoke wheat fields awaiting harvest or parched soil, recalling droughts caused by intensifying heat, while at the same time, as gardens, affirming the possibility of life’s persistence. Whereas in earlier works the characteristic raw canvas often played a major role, or at least glimmered through beneath pigment and binder, in the majority of the newest paintings the paint usually covers the surface completely. Moreover, we find several overlapping and repainted layers of both similar and differing colors.
In addition, the artist presents a new series that reflects on the prematurely deceased Lajos Vajda, taking as a starting point a work from the first years of his settlement in France. Just as in his early practice he often began his paintings by mounting monotypes onto canvas, here he uses monotypes based on Vajda’s works as points of departure. He responds to Vajda’s visual quotations on both paintings and works on paper, complementing them with his own imagery and motifs. The dialogue between the two artists’ works is further reinforced by original drawings by Lajos Vajda, loaned for the duration of the exhibition. István Pető thus not only pays homage to the twentieth-century master but also, in several senses, creates a double portrait.