The ‘Paris of the Pece’ [i.e. the Peța brook], that is Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania), was one of the strongholds of Hungarian cultural life at the beginning of the 20th century, and the memory of its former splendour is preserved by a multitude of Baroque and Art Nouveau buildings. It was here that Ady and his circle founded the Holnap (lit. Tomorrow) literary society, through which the city became the cradle of modern Hungarian literature. György Jovián began his studies in fine arts here.
“Unweit von diesem Zentrum ist auch Urgroßvater, Großvater und die dritte Juristengeneration Joviáns Vater geboren. Drei Vorfahren die sich für das „Recht" ausgebildet haben. Der Vertreter der vierten Generation, Jovián György wollte der „Wahrheit" ins Auge schauen.” (“Born not far from this city, Jovián’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father all studied law, while the fourth generation, György Jovián, wished to confront the truth.”) These are the words of Ingo Glass, his fellow artist from the Banat, in the volume published on the occasion of Jovián’s 60th birthday. (“In the work truth is at work, thus not only something true,” says Heidegger in his study The Origin of the Work of Art.)
After graduating from the Fine Arts Lyceum in Oradea, György Jovián enrolled in the painting programme at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he studied under Florin Mitroi, Constantin Blendea and Marius Cilievici; his true master, however, he considers to have been Corneliu Baba, who also taught such later-renowned painters as Sorin Dumitrescu and the surrealist Ștefan Câlția. He completed his degree in 1974. His diploma work, by his own account, was influenced by László Lakner’s pop-art and Francis Bacon’s grotesque, amorphous shapes. The surnaturalist portrait series reveals a mature talent and confident brushwork. In the same year, Nicolae Ceaușescu became President of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Because the Ceaușescu regime had rejected the 1968 intervention against Czechoslovakia and had also repaid the country’s foreign debt, Western public opinion regarded Romania with a degree of sympathy. Romanian reality, however, was largely defined by poverty and Ceaușescu’s personality cult. Art, whether fine arts, music or literature, nevertheless offered a refuge from the system. The Banat Swabian writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller was socialised under conditions similar to those experienced by György Jovián. Her words reflect the sense of hopelessness that characterised Romania in the 1970s: “Ich habe mir nie vorgenommen, zu schreiben. Ich habe damit angefangen, als ich mir nicht anders zu helfen wusste.” (“I never decided to write. I began when I could find no other way to help myself.”) This sentence may also serve as an explanation for György Jovián’s choice of path, although his own route led towards painting.
After graduating, he rented a studio in the former Capuchin monastery in Oradea. The mystery of the place deepened his faith and, under the influence of lines from the Book of Genesis “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, he reassessed his understanding of existence. Around this time he became acquainted with the work of the Catalan Antoni Tàpies. Tàpies incorporated earth, sand and various fragments of waste into his works alongside paint: “In my art, the parallel drawn between grains of sand and humanity is a symbol of the fragility and insignificance of life.” (Tàpies). From this point on, his use of colour was for a long period reduced to dark, earthy tones and various shades of grey (A hegy – A hegy árnyéka (The Mountain – The Shadow of the Mountain), 1977; Fekete nap – A nap (Black Sun – The Sun), 1977; In memoriam: a fal (In Memoriam: the Wall), 1978–79). His first industrially themed painting also dates from this period (Ipari ciklus (Industrial Cycle), 1976), with a symbolism to which he would repeatedly return over the course of his career, and which reached its culmination in the 2009 series Szép új világ (Brave New World). In the early 1980s he was particularly interested in Italian art; he came into contact with Informel, was influenced by Arte Povera and, following his scholarship in Rome in 1985, turned towards mythologising, figurative trans-avantgarde tendencies. The choice of titles for his compositions referred to antiquity, Christianity and literary movements and works, while he scratched written signs into the material of the paintings. Around the time of his relocation to Hungary, circa 1982, and marking the closure of the Oradea years, he produced the works Hommage á Tapiés and Hommage á van Gogh. Between 1984 and 1987, as a protest against the regulation of the Danube, he created Aquarius, depicting a dying river god, a defining vision of his career realised on the monumental scale of 160 × 420 cm.
The Romanian dictatorship ultimately led to the 1989 revolution, the memorable execution of the ‘Genius of the Carpathians’ before Christmas, and subsequently the tragic events in Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely). By that time, however, György Jovián had already been living and working in Hungary for almost a decade. His large-scale collage Elkötelezetten (Committed), referring to the Holy Trinity, was created as the events in Romania were unfolding.
Thanks to his language skills, foreign study trips and scholarships, he was able to familiarise himself with the most up-to-date artistic trends and thus keep pace with contemporary developments in fine arts. In Switzerland, at the 1986 Basel Art Fair, he met the Belgian interior designer Georgette Ballegeer. In her Liège gallery, the Galerie d’Art Actuel, he had several opportunities to exhibit his works alongside mainly Italian, German, French and Belgian contemporary artists (Marco del Re, Bruno Ceccobelli, Mario Merz, Rudy Piypers). Unfortunately, this exhibition space ceased to exist in the 1990s following the owner’s death.
After brief excursions to abstract art, such as Éjjel és nappal (Night and Day) from 1997, now in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery, and Falrészlet (Wall Fragment) from 2002, Jovián’s path led back to a realist mode of expression. Although his early idol, Tàpies, maintained that “realism does not in fact exist in art, only in the viewer’s mind. Art is a symbol that evokes reality in our imagination. This is why I see no contradiction between abstract and figurative art.”
His 1999 work Bacchus, created after Caravaggio, was cut up in the context of a surnaturalist action, after which he once again returned to sacred themes (Önarckép sebekkel (Self-Portrait with Wounds), 2001; Oltárkép (Altarpiece), 2001–2002). At this time, he began to apply his characteristic raster dots to his paintings, which form a kind of intermediary plane between the viewer and the artwork. His 2001 series Resurrectio homini, depicting pieces of rope, texture fragments and enlarged chain elements, marks the first phase of his hyperrealist period. These works were followed by the Maremma series, with large-scale, almost monochrome pieces, akin to Anselm Kiefer's compositions, presenting earth, mud and clods. In the mid-2000s, he briefly returned to nature, although only to depict wood waste from the forest in monumental-scale paintings. Later, organic material in his works was replaced by heaps of industrial waste, through which destruction and the sense of modern hopelessness prevailing in an increasingly technologised society are articulated, symbolising the slow suicide of consumer culture. Viewed up close, these works often reveal a genuine riot of colours, whose incongruous playfulness intensifies the dramatic impact of the compositions.
He currently produces realist, figurative paintings. One of his key works, the 2009 composition Láng (Flame) depicting a seated male figure, also appears in Gyula Czimbal’s series that won first prize at the 2010 Hungarian Press Photo Contest.
György Jovián defines fine art as the purpose of his existence, and his faith in painting is unshakeable. In recent years, he has created his compositions exclusively in oil on canvas. And yet, since the advent of photography, painting has lost much of its former significance. Over the decades, its nature has been repeatedly reassessed, some considering it outdated, others claiming that it has lost its raison d’être and has become redundant. None of this concerns Jovián. He follows a tradition that spans several centuries, and fleeting artistic methods and trends hold little interest for him. Perhaps he is right. While by the twenty-first century countless forms of fine art have emerged, from collage to electrographics and from performance to video art, painting exhibitions still attract the largest audiences. This does not mean that György Jovián excludes the use of photography in the creation of his works. On the contrary, he usually photographs his chosen subjects and then creates his monumental compositions by ‘enlarging’ these images onto the canvas. Likewise, he does not rule out the use of other materials, such as sand, textile fragments or wall paint, especially in his earlier work. Today, however, these function solely as tools in the service of the final goal, the creation of the painting itself.
“Jovián’s works, (for example through their link to Flemish still lifes), are deeply rooted in European traditions. It is impossible to remove them from the history of art and culture, and if, on this basis, we were to look for a historically defined style, we would have to describe a highly individual variant of realism. His works are primarily associated with the trans-avantgarde, insofar as, according to Achille Bonito Oliva, one of its most important cornerstones is that ‘artists see the possibility of moving forward in the revival of manual skills’. In Jovián’s case, this forward movement also takes shape in the use of his own photographs as sketches and in photorealism, while the techniques learned from Baroque masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and El Greco reconnect his work to the traditions of the profession.” This is how Brigitta Muladi summarised the essence of György Jovián’s art in her 2011 monograph.
Although his worldview cannot be described as unequivocally pessimistic, the sombre mood of his subjects and his dark tonal palette place him far from the most optimistic artists. The subject of his melancholic works is “a diagnostic record of human fate” (Gábor Lajta), most often solitude, vulnerability, emptiness and transience. A constant characteristic of his art is a kind of metaphysical timelessness. When viewing his paintings, time loses its significance and space becomes indeterminate. There is no real action in his images, which appear rather as still lifes, even when human figures are present. The nature of their backgrounds is most often not self-evident. While we sense an open, gaping space that evokes depth in his works, he most often imagines a greyish wall behind his compositions, even if this is not clearly discernible in the paintings, which, by his own admission, refers to a ‘border experience’ that runs through his entire life and serves as a symbol both of exclusion and of being locked into one’s own inner world. György Jovián thus arrived, largely unconsciously and through his art, at a form of Christian existentialism that regards individual existence as the origin of knowledge and says that facing the essence happens in the limit situations that arise in life. At the same time, his works are not devoid of Romanticism either, which manifests itself in longing, in nostalgia for distant, vanished eras or perhaps for worlds that never truly existed.
He regards music as a kind of absolution for his painting, its spirituality and abstraction forming a counterpoint to the materiality of fine arts. “The spiritual life of modern man is becoming ever more complicated. We search for world-saving theories, we want to rest the lonely ship of our damaged soul in the harbour of excitement-free pleasures. Some kind of harmony, some kind of complement is needed. And this offers itself naturally in music.” Géza Csáth wrote this in 1907. György Jovián has portrayed outstanding musicians on several occasions, most recently the cellist Ildikó Szabó in an airy composition, and he has also attempted to translate music into painterly terms. His 2011 work Tájkép vörös sárral (Landscape with Red Mud) can be read as a visual manifestation of serial music. His exhibition openings are often classical music concerts as well. His exhibition LX, organised at the Kiscelli Museum on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, was opened by Kristóf Baráti, winner of the 2010 Moscow Paganini Competition, performing on the 1703 Stradivarius known as the Lady Harmsworth.
In recent years a certain process of clarification has become perceptible in his work: the physically demanding creative process has been replaced by a slower, more balanced, contemplative mode of working. Not only have his subjects become more tangible, but the manner in which the paint is spread is now more even, as opposed to the heightened expressive materiality produced earlier by thick, densely applied impasto layers. As a result, his compositions have become more harmonious. His most recent period is characterised by finely elaborated portraits.
György Jovián shaped his lyrical form of expression through a synthesis of classical fine art and avant-garde tendencies, and it radiates talent, dedication and the humanism inherent in the painter’s being. In his birthday tribute, György Szemadám notes: “I love György Jovián’s paintings because when I look at them I can encounter a kind of spirituality that has long seemed to be lost.” By way of conclusion, let us quote György Jovián’s ars poetica: “I start from myself and try to put my personality traits into whatever I am doing at the moment. This is about my own life and about the compulsion to paint. In truth it hardly matters what I paint, but I must paint.”
[2015]