They lived in a corner house on Nyár Street, where everything was spacious and the sun shone peacefully in the afternoons. For a century, the smell of coffee and cakes emanating from the kitchen was unchanged. The soot-smoke from the tiled stove in the great room was also bathed in light. The smells and sounds of lights intertwined like fringes of thick carpets. The weekdays in the apartment were occasionally interrupted by the smell of freshly opened cucumbers and jam.
The innocuous warmth of the rooms was regularly invaded by the ideas of the streets, the results of which were always unfavourable. After the events of the outside world, they kept hoping to see the past again, to have it come knocking at their door. When they no longer hoped to see the past again, new uninvited ideas would ring in to compensate for their loss, and they would laugh and tell them their old stories, and new songs would be sung by invisible choirs. The smell of lights and cakes still lingered in the rooms.
The exhibition shows the changes of the 20th century and Budapest through a series of graphics, where history constantly, invisibly, overlaps visible spaces and human lives. The representation of this invisible change and visible permanence is the subject of my paintings. Where we pawn the past to be redeemed by the future, where goods that can be lost are lost, and where the invisible becomes surprisingly palpable against the light of the unseen, even behind our closed eyelids.
Zoltán Ötvös