Subjective Perception
It must have been during that great pandemic that overshadowed our very existence that the tops of the pine trees lost their ancient poise. These solitary trees reaching toward the sky no longer dominated the space alone, but made room for two other companions. Thus were born—reborn—the three-peaked pine trees… The initially enigmatic title of Attila Kondor’s canvas, “One-Peakedness,” in its very paradoxical nature, conceals a world reveling in green, a buzzing, swirling world that—at the same time—radiates calm, peace, and cool strength. For what could be more powerful than the most talented painter of our world, this sacred thing—nature. Which, with the sight of its green resplendent in a hundred thousand hues, is capable of repainting our thoughts and our innermost emotions just as surely as the pale-blue sky stretching into the unknown distance, modestly yielding…
But back to the summit.
Here is this pine-like entity, the ‘Tree’. The wisest formation of our existence. The tree that—like the exclamation mark of a wishful sentence—rises above the rest. Who knows if it has a summit. Who can see it with a painter’s eye from such a distance. Who knows its lived fears, its fate, its life’s journey, that certain rebirth that always ends in death. It goes, goes up to the sky, and then one day it falls into it. Headfirst… Subjective perception? Well, art is like that; when I think of the One-Peaked Mountain, the three-peaked pines come to mind.
The Garden as an Idyll and as an Idea
Is there any existence more idyllic than the garden? It is the earthly replica of our heavenly Paradise. An idea borrowed from the eternal God, proving that idyll does indeed exist. Must one die for it? Come now. Here is the garden, where we can fulfill our heavenly desires. The garden in which continuity always dwells. The continuation and fulfillment of our inner being. The deepest Self, where the essence resides. From teeth-gritting self-assertion to swirling sexuality. That self-assertive sexuality, which is full of fears and anxieties, until it completely surrenders itself…
Yes, this is the garden. The stilled consciousness that surrenders itself to the very end. This is Kondor’s garden. The present existence. The garden of contemporary existence, where the mist of our gaze—drawn from the Earth-sphere—guides the striking green of the water-filled fountain toward the pale blue of our natural waters… Where are we here? In other words, where is man in this dehumanized world? On the one hand, in every blade of grass (it suffices to think of Babits). On the other hand, in the circularity of the fountain, in the solitude of the columns leading to the water, in the dead dignity of the stiffened stone statues of Egyhegyűség. Let us not be mistaken. This is a cultivated environment. A world of art cultivated by our consciousness. Part of nature, yet torn from nature. Earthly existence itself. The Bearer of our consciousness…
A Dialogue Between Sovereign Worlds
Baksai bursts into this—seemingly—idyllic world. A powerfully anthropocentric worldview that contemplates the global nature of existence, in which a horse’s head is nothing more than a subjective impression of the present world. A fragmented, black-and-white imprint of our consciousness, which speaks objectively, without detours, of the ethereal… impossibility of existence, of infinite fidelity and the impossibility of fidelity—all at once. An embraced animality, in which an animal entity is not our potential friend, but we ourselves. The horse that asks no questions. (Here, however, let us think of Ady.) The Helper… the Bearer… the one full of wounds… A succession of silent horse heads, like a visual world torn apart by the hiatuses of morality falling to pieces. Silence as an ethical norm.
Reality without questions.
And just as the stark black-and-white of Baksai’s paintings gives way to rich crimson, the human figure gradually emerges. The horse heads on one wall become human faces on the other. The era taking shape in human faces. The weight and power of our nascent millennium. Era, drawing—the title offers a clue. Answers to the present age are concealed, crumpled into the folds of human faces… Despair, a shy smile, a meditative collapse into oneself, the dual consciousness of our existence. These too are bearers of our orphaned consciousness, just like the gardens of Kondor’s canvases.
But what is the relationship between Baksai’s world and Kondor’s? How do two sovereign worlds—one strikingly anthropomorphic and the other stripped of flesh-and-blood figures—enter into dialogue? Very well, I’ll repeat it. Wherever we look, in these extreme manifestations of the carriers of individual experience, we see a generously authentic, meticulously period-accurate imprint of our present world. Both in forms that come to life to the point of deception and in those that are gently objectified. Certainty. The certainty of the uncertainty of human consciousness—and with it, human existence. It is like a path winding through the rocks. The horse that is not shod.
Katalin Kállai