Béla Hamvas considers it particularly important that the basic color of Renaissance painting is purple, because it is a mixed color, in which red-blooded life meets the sky-blue consciousness that hovers above it. Endre Kecső’s exhibition Regenesis attempts to bring this dual tonality back into contemporary art: it is no coincidence that the motto-like expression is so reminiscent of regeneration, healing, rebirth.
For while Christian eschatology knows only one great “clean slate”, if we think of the flood – and disregard the afterlife, which renounces the redness of corporeality – the ancient mysticism is full of new beginnings. For thousands of years, people believed from the shores of the Baltic to the islands of the Indian Ocean – spanning the Mediterranean – that every catastrophic, apocalyptic event is also a celebration of joy, because it is an opportunity to wash away sins.
Ends and beginnings are inseparable complements, one cannot exist without the other, so the mind must overcome the flesh. It must accept that progress involves sacrifice and that it can only achieve its appointed goal through humility. The path is not a straight one, of course, as the circularity of existence turns into a spiral, but the ornamentation of the spiral lines frames the dawn of a new day in gold.