What
can you see blind man?/ What can you hear blind man?/ What can you feel
blind man? /
You can’t see the world championship, you can’t see the Grundes League,
you can’t see Schwarzenegger, you can’t see porn, you can’t see the ministers,
you can’t see the glass pockets. / What can you see then? / What, blind
man?
The lines quoted from Vakember-blues (Blind Man’s Blues) could be the motto for the brand new exhibition of Béla drMáriás. The life condition of taking off from everyday life as interpreted by drMáriási can be said to be an extremely lucky situation. All you need to do is just close your eyes and you are surrounded by darkness straight away but in this darkness bits of images of the outside world you could see a second before are still flittering and fulgurating; it takes quite a few seconds before you can really say that now you cannot see anything at all. In the latest series of images of the Blind Man’s Diary drMáriás registers the intermediate state before complete darkness, in other words he paints the memory fritters of the visible world on a black background. By creating a conscious state of blindness – a negative picture – he penetrates new notional and physical extensions of Nothing: ”I keep a Blind Man’s Diary, I write and draw on nothing. Darkness is nice. Contours flare up, memories, events that never were and never will be but are still true. The eyes cannot see, but the soul, the blooming and crashed out soul can. It can see man looming above nothing, tearing out his own tongue and passing it on grinning. He turns his retina inside out, pushes it here and there, pointing headlights on it, which go out, break, transform, clear colours falling into the darkness. The Blind Man’s Diary records nothing, sketches it on the forehead of time in the classroom of anticipation. What we can see are blackboards of the lessons of chosen blindness.
Blindness is one of the most evident metaphors of Nothing in the poetic sense of the word, so it is a voluntarily undertaken life situation and at the same time it is also a possible form of behaviour of bemusing used to serve a creator’s adventures. It is absolute hallucination, seeing the soul. In the black surface of the pictures there are human and animal figures of roughly drawn anatomy, characteristic of drMáriás, fractions of words and sentences are swirling like objects out of balance in space. Nothing has got a constant consistence, place, relation, notional validity, material quality, in the grinder of space a cosmic tornado messes up things which are believed to be absolutely defined and exact in reality. Ninety years ago under the aegis of ”parole in libertá” Italian futurists threw apart in the same way the joints of the coherence of rational world condensed into poetry to be able to see more clearly behind the scenes of motion and accelerating time. The conclusion drMáriás draws from it is that chaos can only be arrested and neutralised by Nothing, because only Nothing has got an inherent neutral state.
The career of drMáriás in the period of Hungarian dénouement follows the philosophy of ”day in day out”. In his exhibition organised in 2001 in the Gallery of the Óbuda Club under the title I only trust in the help of politicians! Long live Politicondoms! he made a virtue from the hypersensitivity of the spiritual attitude of the ”seer”, but even then it was obvious that he would rather send the whole tangible world into hell. The metaphor of blindness is the necessary response to all the antipathy and aversion he feels towards his external environment viewed with irony and deep cynicism. So far he has tried to find soothing shelter in the in the dazzling whiteness of space, whereas now he qualifies its optical opposition as a tabula rasa, and in its plane there is the left over consistence of broken up archaic state, which can provide permanent support for immortals searching for their origin on the cobble stones of their desire for the archaic state.
Through the Blind Man’s Diary the artist has reached a significant turning point, and with the help of the new optics he has created the critical start line of all his artistic work so far. In the best moment he felt the necessity of change, which can be said to be beneficial in respect of idiomatic visualisation, and at the same time he challenged himself by asking: what is the terminus where the process of identifying nothing started with obstinate perseverance can? Is it concealment?