“Beauty is greatest where it cannot be seen, where it simply exists, in the landscape, in a pillar, in the curve of a hill, in a smile.” (Béla Hamvas)
The sacred monuments standing along the roadsides are still able to fulfill their original purpose and spiritual function today – they make us stop, quiet us down, and inspire us to reflect. The crosses and statues that once populated the Carpathian Basin, standing in grain fields, on the border, on vineyards, in church gardens, or in cemeteries, are now slowly disappearing, their condition steadily deteriorating.
Since the 1970s, Ferenc Olasz has been photographing the material remains of our spiritual heritage that can still be found in Hungarian-inhabited settlements. After graduating from the Teacher Training College in Eger and then the Hungarian History Department of József Attila University in Szeged, he began taking photographs as a young teacher: his intellectual curiosity drew his attention to his immediate surroundings. His first subjects were his close friends, neighbors, and elderly residents of Alsópáhok, followed by their houses, yards, stone crosses on the edge of the village, and tin Christs and Marys. This is where his photographic journey, which he regarded as a mission, began.
His work is not defined by a conscious documentary program; he approaches images intuitively, seeking ways to visually represent moods and feelings. Over the course of his six–decade career, his photographs and films have become important records of the last moments of values that still existed in a changing social and natural environment.
Today, many religious customs have fallen into oblivion and lost their original community-building or faith-strengthening function. However, the survival of traditions is often linked to a small sacred monument, which not infrequently serves as the only remaining cultural heritage of a settlement and can even become a bearer of community memory and identity.
The title of the exhibition, I Seek Your Face, is a quote from the best-known work of the Italian-born Benedictine abbot, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Proslogion, which is as much a prayer as it is a declaration of his desire to know the face of God. Ferenc Olasz’s choice of title is a philosophical self-definition of his search for God, and in fact a natural description of his activity. All his photographs are portraits insofar as they preserve something that makes the absent present.