“I stand on the edge of a cliff, a bottomless abyss beneath my feet. Although I have a magnificent view in every direction over a volcanic island rising out of the Atlantic, I think of an alien from another time and a place far away.
Half a century ago, an independent woman paid for a group bus trip to the Soviet Union. They stopped in new towns every day on the way to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. At the local market, she couldn’t get enough of hurmas, the orange-red, sweet and plummy fruit that was then unknown in Hungary. Suddenly it hit me: could she be pregnant? She tried in vain, then and there she could not reach the father of the foetus growing in her heart, so the burden remained hers alone.
Since then, the Soviet Union and the woman have long since disappeared, but it is probably because of that one-way trip that I can stand here over the abyss.”
Amidst torn up atlases and guidebooks, an astronomical telescope pointed into the past stands at the axis of the exhibition space. In one of the oil paintings, a lone female figure on donkeyback with a baby in her arms is receding towards the cliffs of Pamir or perhaps Nanga Parbat, while in the foreground a merry group of contemporaries are taking photographs under a Parisian gate.
Emese Kudász spent the last 25 years of her life in the solitude of her studio in Buda, still immovable, yet always longing to go far away. Instead of a diary, decades flow into each other in the undated watercolours of her imaginary journeys. If we wanted to, we could recognise the wanderers resting in his paintings, among them his son, who exchanges inner solitude for outer solitude, walking the world.
The gallery in the King’s Pass (once Joliot-Curie) Square is halfway between the black beaches of Lanzarote, part of the Canary Islands group, and the Tajik National Park.
Mother and son wave to each other from 50 years and 8,000 km away.