Once I had the opportunity to have fun in a parlour. We were visiting the brothers and sisters of my grandmother in a tiny village in Baranya county – old ladies in black headscarves, happy old man sneaking off to get wine from the cellar carved out of the rock, dogs, cats, grunting pigs, in other words the unrepeatable experience of ”the small girl from the city in the country for the first time” – and from the cool kitchen I trod carefully into the room. It was dark, the inimitable mixture of the smell of must and mouse, and at the back there was a lonely double bed with huge pillows, piled high with duvets covered with a beautifully embroidered counterpane. I had felt such pure please as when I threw myself onto the top of the pile and sank into the cool, soft, inviting nothing. My mother’s strict call ordered me out of the floundering: it was only then that I realised that I had breached an up till then, unknown taboo. The parlour is not for using everyday – or playing in – instead it is a place that shows how rich the inhabitants are, and due to this the museum-like cemetery of valuable and treasured objects. You can only be born and die here, ”free” access is only permitted during important family and religious events. It is from this hermetic seal that the two characteristics of the parlour originate: on the one hand due to the lack of the signs of everyday existence it is lifeless, sterile and afunctionally empty, and on the other hand (in connection with this) it provides a sacred space to live the special moments of life in.
These characteristics are those – beside the title of the exhibition – that define the 18 paintings by Attila Szűcs exhibited in the Church Square of the Kiscelli Museum. These are interiors the object world of which is exceptionally reduced: beds, armchairs, curtains, blinds, table, chair, lights, and occasionally some supplementary elements. The picture is placed in still further shadow by the exhibition venue, the religious (holy) character of its original function has been retained to a great degree. Few exhibiting artists make use of the possibility in this solemn atmosphere, an exception to this is Attila Szűcs, he really does play with the sacredness in the space. The church square actually has – according to the present use – two apses. By turning the walled up entrance and the open (original) apse to each other in the place of the unidirectional reading Szűcs places the virtual picture of a special, closed capsule. At the same time the two end points of this also illuminate the duality that characterises the artist’s work: although he sees himself as a realist painter, his art is not without the features of metaphysical painting.
At one end point of the capsule (at the present entrance) is one of the emphasised motifs of the artist, the bed. The process is characteristic of Szűcs’s creating method, bringing to life the same theme, processing it from different aspects, however, the analysis of this is not the purpose of this piece of writing. The common characteristic of these three paintings (virtual triptych) is dramatisation taken to its extremes. Their central theme is a huge, white bed that is highlighted by one or more directed and artificial light sources from the space around it, which space is free of any signs of real spatial relations. The cold whiteness of the neon lights make the double beds into stages themselves; and in the foot-lights enigmatic still-life elements occur, are given a leading role like a bunch of grapes or a fighter aircraft made of paper. The metaphysicality of the paintings, their timeless and symbolic connotations (the erotically shivering, womanly soft grapes versus the subjugating, macho fighter plane) are further shaded by the strange shortenings and points of view – the bunch of grapes, for example, is lying on a sagging ”bed” that is similar to a cake slice.
Attila Szűcs has always been interested in the problem of sight, in the optical phenomenon that a precondition of a perfect picture is the joining of two different sights focussed by the two eyes, which, besdie this, overcomes the problem of the fault coded into sight due to the blind spot on the retina – that is the area covered by the optic nerve and so insensitive to light. We can observe the further thoughts of earlier interpretations of these two optical phenomenon on the ”diptychs” along the side walls. These four large sized pictures seem to be the successors of the stereoscopic pictures. The original stereoscopic pictures with the placing next to each other of the different visual spaces seen by the two eyes, have operated with the creation of the illusion of space, which Szűcs has changed so that the solving of the different dichotomies hidden in the picture pairs, that is the visual problems can be carried out, precisely due to the complex reflecting relationships or the unclear space adaptation, on the conceptual plane. The two pictures entitled Shutters with dark patches and A room with yellow curtains and wallpaper seem as if they were projecting two different views of the same space (room) next to each other, for example when beside the view of an empty room filled with white light seeping through the gaps of the half closed shutters he places the picture of optical patches generated by the light filtering acility of the shutters. What was earlier a contradiction within the homogenous technique of the painting, an oval surface patch or deficiency, is now sharply separated from its environment (The inside of a room with additional patches), or is completely ruling it (Armchair with a glimmering patch).
Natural and artificial light conditions and the relation between closed and opened space is shown in eight small-sized pictures, which connect the following units. On the one hand these paintings strengthen the viewers in their feeling that the warm and safe closedness of their everyday living-space is only illusion: the spaces of the rooms are lit with neon light and they have confused space conditions (Bed with three neon tubes and a repainted door), and they look just as sterile, freezing and empty as the conference rooms of the business world (Room with yellow suite). On the other hand, with a difficult system of covering and transparency Szűcs expands space outside too, but the external world, the possibility of exit is always covered with a curtain, that is the realistic world of images is merged with the sacral and metaphoric iconographic tradition of the curtain (Light behind a curtain, Night from inside, Three neon tubes behind a curtain).
People cannot enter the halted time of the interiors, only the presence of ”the most faithful partner” or a trophy refers to their existence. The two live characters of the three large ”animal pictures” (a German shepherd and a black dog) move like strangers in these spaces, and sometimes their presence just emphasises the fact that the space of the picture falls onto picture planes contradicting each other. Beside the confusing multiplanes there is also a surrealistic ambiguity (the appearance of a deer’s trophy with a Christmas tree in an unknown space) – and then we have not mentioned the facture or colours of the paintings, which emphasise the presence of illogical elements and coded ambiguities by moving the viewer’s eyes.
At the end of the capsule a ”triptych” is placed with a summarising motif, which clearly shows how Attila Szűcs’s realistic and personal, sensual painting is connected with archetypal (or metaphorical, if you like) levels. On the picture on the right hand side there are two double beds with bedcovers with flower patterns, in a strangely zoomed field. The beds, which look like beds in hotel rooms, are floating in a huge, empty space evoking the comforting beauty of nature and its artificial and humanised (comfortable) equivalent at the same time. In other words spring, rebirth, love, sex (”the bed then in this interpretation is a reference system, somehow as sexuality balances, in which case the hand is a fine animal ” A.Sz.), and the extreme development of this, the unique and special point in everyone’s life, birth. The middle element is a cascading, corrugated, blood red curtain. Separates and connects: pulsing desire and burning passion, on the other hand, bloody agony and flesh-splitting pain. On the left side there is – seemingly the odd one out in the exhibition, but now known in the works of the artist – one of his pictures that is ”packed full” of strange objects: a Reconstructed Scaffold. Wistful, reserved world of colours, stage-like space, with two tiny, point-like light sources, a tap at the rear wall, cables, chair, ladder – all recognisable, everyday objects, which, however, all incompletely, unlinked float in a very dense moment. If there were a start, the end is here. Not in bed, between pillows, but our own body deserts us. And what remains after the unmistakable fall: silence. And the scent of the scaffold in the parlour.