Amazing Creatures

Following forgotten Mediterranean parks, empty American roads leading to the infinite, anthropomorphic cars and planes, the determinative motifs of Szotyory’s newest period are mostly predators or wild animals. Lions, wolves with luminous and hypnotic eyes, big muscular dogs appear who, cut out from the real environment dive into a misty timelessness, characteristic of the artist’s work.

We balance on unstable planks as we try to examine the animals’ intention, vulnerable, motionless as we are petrified by their ’authoritative beauty’. Macabre is this beauty – perhaps one of the sources of man’s attraction towards them – which is reinforced by the force that animals’ anatomy diffuse or by the gloomy clouds, suspicious skies.

The viewer will associate the scenes with different prefigurations from the artistic field, from the wild animal iconography of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages to the rictuses of the stone carvings in the shadows of monastery cloisters, but also saint and profane attributes, noble symbols of the Renaissance, as well as hunting scenes in forests, XIXth century sketches and drawings, Avar vestiges, Scandinavian runestones may also occur to us.

Legends and myths surround them, our relation to them is to be traced back until the Ancient times. Their shapes are deeply carved in our collective unconsciousness, they are frequent recurring actors of our dreams carrying positive and negative associations, sometimes suggesting force, sometimes fear.

Wolves are considered for instance totem animals in several cultures, they are mythical animals of the Roman and German mythology who not only attented the birth of Empires (the she-wolf, mother of Romulus and Remus) or symbolize victory, but also embody the ultimate destruction of the world like in the German mythology in which the ancient wolf Fenrir finishes with Odin, the major god, and then swallows the Sun and bites the Moon off the sky, bringing hence the end of the world.

Several paths of thought encounter in Szotyory’s ’wild beast figures’, as we take in consideration the exterior aesthetical attraction towards these creatures, or the representation of their inner part or the web of system of beliefs they represent.

What holds together the different layers is the forceful emotional charge of the works, and how eternity encounters the ardent brush strokes which makes the creatures present and tangible for the viewer.