In the series I am presenting now, I start from the seemingly uneventful space, in which the slowly unfolding changes and transformations create a vital movement or vibration.
One of the keys to the image-making process is the layering of colours, up to thirty or forty layers. This patient, long-over-time brushwork is the gap where the viewer comes into contact with the human presence.
The maximum focus with which the painting is made, the time slipping into timelessness that I spend shaping the image in front of the canvas, gives me the surplus of energy that shines through to the viewer.
I deeply feel and respect the work of Péter Eszterházy. “For Géza Ottlik’s seventieth birthday, from the tenth to the fifteenth of December, one thousand nine hundred and eighty-one, I copied School on the Border on a 57×77 drawing board in about 250 hours. That’s how this picture was made. E.P.”
The pictures in the exhibition were taken over the last year or so. As I spend most of my day with my three children, I have painted them in short hours at a time with monastic patience.
This is how the paintings, which are quasi-portraits of colour, were born, my attempts to answer my own existential questions.
Ágnes Kontra