Kecskemét

A painter exhibits his photographs now here, in an architectural gallery.

These photographs are the sideproducts of years of collecting, many lonesome strollings. It will be thirty years next year that whenever I can and more or less regularly I spend a few weeks, maybe a month in the Kecskemét Studio House of the Arts Fund, where I can work in monastic silence and under ideal circumstances in the spacious studios. Whenever getting tired at work, i generally take long walks in the area as for active relaxation. i make a trip into nature, setting out straight, and walk miles into the land sometimes this way, sometimes that way. The starting point (or coming back the last section) of one of my favourite routes is the sycamore tree-lined Bakule Márton street.

I have led a painting class since 1990 at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and with my disciples we thought it is best to start with painting monochrome works. Pondering the problems of radical painting at the time i read the theoretical works of Yves Klein, Joseph Marioni, Marcia Hafif and others and as it generally happens, the mandatory ’incidental meeting’-effect came into the picture: strolling the streets i realized that there were two monochrome pictures on each perpendicular wall (the northern and southern end masonry walls) of every building.

The line of the front windows is continued on the sides – as if we would strengthen a cardboard box side by side with a tape – creating two square like shapes above each other. Later i already started out equipped with a camera and with the ’didactic consideration’ to show it to my pupils: i wanted to record these ad hoc monochrome works that were supposedly to enliven the boring monotomy of the series of empty walls with colored spots at their edges. At first I intended to make only a few shots but later i quickly finished the entire film for there were no two alike. after developing i examined the 9 by 12 cm small blow-ups like abstract compositions, and wondered how i could apply my findings ’artistically’.

Returning the photos to the black foto prost envelope i put them away together with all sorts of other photographs and forgot about the whole thing for years. In march of 2007 and in Kecskemét again, i saw the excellent play, ’Berlin, Griefwalder Strasse’ of a german playwright (unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name), and as far as i remember, this brought back my unfinished Bakule Márton street project.

Next day i returned to the premises, made some more photographs and i was toying with the idea again. i registered the changes: whereever there was money, some renovations were done and the two colored parallelograms disappeared, elsewhere it was apparent that time had passed and the condition of the buildings built by the People’s Front in 1967 had deteriorated. a satellite areal was built here, a basketball board there, corrugated sheet roofs were installed above the stairs at several spots. Trees grew and vanished in the meantime. A fence appeared where earlier there was none.

At the beginning of this summer we had a discourse with Bálint Nagy and the idea came up to have an exhibit at the gallery in Hajós street. This project came to my mind, still just an idea, a draft, and i showed it to him. We agreed that exhibiting this project may be relevant due to its architectural bearing. the large pictures exhibited here have been created with Bálint’s contribution, done by computer and printed a meter wide.

Zsigmond Károlyi