Our colleague, who had been invited to exhibit in our studio gallery, canceled his November exhibition. I had to make a quick decision.
Three years ago, I took out some unfinished pictures that I had taken 20-25 years ago. What happened next was not the first time this had happened to me. After looking at the pictures again, I was convinced of the validity of my solutions, which I had previously considered unsatisfactory.
When I mention validity here, I am not primarily thinking about whether these pictures are good or not. Rather, I am more concerned with what prevented me from seeing what I see today two decades ago. Or, what is it that I don’t see today that I saw then?
One way or another, we can quickly arrive at this conclusion, and in many respects, to the experience of time. But can the painted image be the subject of the experience of time? Especially in the context of a painting practice where, as a result of a process that tumbles through various degrees of abstraction, the subject of the image will always be the image itself.
Before I say anything else about the painted image, I can say with certainty that in terms of its use of materials and physical dimensions, it is an object. As such, it is part of object culture, and I would add that it is a very special part of object culture.
The images that make up this exhibition — whether found pieces or recent creations — are, in terms of their inspiration, openly and closely related to visual experiences, a fact that does not stand in sharp contrast to the other fact that, in their objectified forms, i.e. in their pictorial effect, the images themselves appear as sights and/or not as sights of something.
Perhaps this phenomenon is one possible answer to the question of what prevented me from seeing what I see today. Most likely, twenty-five years ago, an unidentifiable thought was working in me alongside my primary image-creating intention, which wanted to be smarter than what I saw. I had to see it, because I did what I can see today in the same form.
In the end, in a convoluted way, this now undetectable intention, alien to the real subject of the image, proved to be smarter, if not to my eyes, then certainly to itself, considering that it made me decide to roll up the rolls and put them in storage.
I left questions and suggestions unanswered, and even those I did try to answer remained very vague and sketchy, or, if you will, enigmatic. This is only partly due to rational space constraints.
On the other hand, since the text places great emphasis on the visual aspect and imagery, and the exhibition will also focus heavily on this, I decided to take a risk and add a minimal narrative to this event.
All the more so because, ever since I became aware of my painterly sensibility, my central aspiration has been to avoid and alienate any kind of narrative from my images as much as possible.
Tibor Nádor