Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art’s latest exhibition Borderless Lines (accumulated paintings) presents a selection of the latest series by Tamás Jovanovics (1974). The artist, who has been living and working abroad for decades, has a consistent painterly programme with many links to the archetypical elements of modernist painting, such as the line and the structure of the grid. A major motif in the consistent, meticulously developed oeuvre is the line, whose successions, drawn in dense parallelograms, were initially arranged on a white background, mostly in horizontal compositions.
From the 2010s onwards, the white background was followed by black, and in addition to the horizontal lines, vertical and diagonal intersecting lines appeared in the oeuvre of Jovanovics. Almost without exception, the repetitive system of coloured lines was characterised by a strict order and steadiness. However, since the explicit order of the painting’s structure is based on repetition, Jovanovics’ approach is never overwhelming, as he favours the use of the all-over editing principle, not only to extend the rigour of the lines and the illusionistic (virtual) forms created by the colour variations towards infinity, but also to expand the format of the painting itself in the direction of infinity.
Jovanovics’s oeuvre, which has been accumulating for decades, can be grouped into seven different types, of which the latest series presented in his current solo show is related to two earlier ones: the parallel straight lines series and the so-called sliced paintings. As a fusion of the two types, Jovanovics retained the ‘main motif’ of the oeuvre, the straight line arranged in horizontal and vertical parallels, but the structural design of the works suggests a slow tilt from the ‘conventional’ rectangular format as the final shape of painting. Indeed, each work is created by joining together a number of smaller and larger rectangular canvas boards, up to as many as nineteen.
The accumulated panels give the impression of an all-over structure, evading in all directions, where the horizontal and vertical character seems to be only in a momentarily fixed state. Indeed, the individual formats could extend in all directions to infinite dimensions. What is also remarkable in comparison with the earlier sliced paintings is the way in which the single panels of the accumulated compositions are now not arranged in structures that seem to fall apart and shift away from each other, but on the contrary, are arranged in structures that connect to each other with, so to say, magnetic intensity.
Most importantly, in his latest series, which combines earlier types of motifs and forms, Tamás Jovanovics radically shifts away from his notoriously meticulous way of precisely organising lines with the help of a ruler, “stepping beyond his own shadow”. This time, as a significant technical shift, we are not confronted with a system of sharp, geometric lines, but with compositions made up of roughly drawn horizontal and vertical lines painted with a foam roller, reflecting the fluidity and spontaneity of freehand action.
The apparent floating of the parallel lines of each panel is further enhanced by the ‘looseness’ of the lighter and darker, translucent shades of colour that are placed over each other with the foam roller, overlapping or even framing the different layers. Jovanovics layers the different shades of colour on top of each other until they add up to create coloured greys that form every second parallel line of each panel.
The investigation of the colour grey and the exploration of its colourfulness were inspired, among other things, by the monumental retrospective exhibition of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2023-24. Interestingly, besides Jovanovics, Zsigmond Károlyi, another important master of contemporary Hungarian painting, has also been deeply influenced by this enigmatic figure of modern painting.
Mónika Zsikla