György Jederán was a pupil of Dóra Maurer at Iparon, a true experimenter and perfectionist to the end of his life.
Thirty years ago, Jederán took part in a course in Photogrammatics led by Dóra Maurer. A year later, he graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts, and despite the past thirty years, he is still interested in refraction and reflection.
It may seem to some that he is stuck in the photogram genre, but it is not. It is the relationship between light and light-sensitive material that brings us close to the essence of photography, and in George’s case it is rather a question of his having found, already in his early years, the essential question that has accompanied him throughout his artistic career and has enabled him to reach new depths.
At the same time, he chose a technical form of expression whose forerunners are among the most important artists in photography, starting with Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, who patented the calotype process in 1840. The photogram’s use in the fine arts was decades in the making, but the work of Schad, Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy fundamentally overturned the by then rigid patterns of photography.
In addition to these well-known artists, György became acquainted with the works of artists and photographers who built on the Hungarian tradition of the photogram, since in the period between the two world wars, camera-less photography was present, if not strongly, in the works of Lajos Lengyel, Alajos Martsa or Victor Vasarely.
And it is also noticeable that those artists who have immersed themselves in the world of the photogram have not escaped it in the course of their artistic careers. The Hungarian artists mentioned above were still making photograms in the 1970s, along with their new colleagues, and here I would like to highlight Tihamér Gyarmathy and György Lőrinczy in particular.
It was in this relatively isolated circle of artists that five young artists came into the limelight, presenting the results of a visual experimental seminar held in the framework of the Institute of Visual Communication at the College of Applied Arts on September 5, 1987. György Jederán participated in this seminar as a photography student, together with Balázs Czeizel, Ágnes Eperjesi, Teodóra Hübner and Csaba Zsuffa.
“The photogram that is considered the simplest is not easy at all.” – said György at the time, “The basic case is when only a subtle purple colour appears on the illuminated photographic paper and nothing is inserted in between.” From there began the creative process, the current stage of which was displayed on the gallery wall yesterday. In the meantime, we can see that George’s expression has been influenced by a new way of expressing himself, as the intellectual influence of Coburn, who produced a series called Vortograph in 1917 and was concerned with the nature of refraction before the use of the avant-garde photogram after the First World War, is striking.
In this sense, György is the heir and transmitter of his thinking on the nature of light, since the last thirty years reflect his focus on the fundamental questions of photography as a medium and, through his references to the history of photography, the development of a creative approach that is constantly looking back but always moving forward, a perspective that is only available to artists who are concerned with the essential questions, whenever they find them.
Peter Baki