One of our “graphic magicians”, our “graphic philosophers”, István Orosz is a many-sided, many-voiced artist who resembles no one else – unless, perhaps, he evokes in us the polymath artists of the Renaissance or the alchemists who dreamt of the philosopher’s stone and the making of gold. Yet in his works, with their visual traps and startling intellectual somersaults, the strongest flavours are those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – not least his attraction to the art of strange dreams: Surrealism.

Orosz is a wanderer and a free spirit, one of those born travellers who, in his drawings, wraps himself in his wizard’s cloak and flies back and forth through time, disregarding the dry realists’ linear “only-forward” concept of time. He roams among his favourite motifs – ancient staircases, antique columns, enchanted gardens, labyrinths, reflections and mirror images, fantastic buildings and the absences of buildings – as that old traveller from the City of Flowers, Dante, once did, still accompanied on his journeys up and down by his chosen master, Virgil.

Orosz, though born to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, wanders alone through earlier ages, now in his own sweater, now – when meeting Dürer – donning, in homage, the latter’s robe. Every one of his graphic sheets is also a “landscape of time”; it is no coincidence that he gave precisely this title (Idő látképei – [Time Sights]) to one of the summits of his oeuvre, his 2004 animated film. […]

His characteristic graphic style recalls nineteenth-century engravings – the illustrations of old Hungarian editions of Jules Verne books. A virtuoso of graphic techniques, he masters every method: etching, ink drawing, aquatint, digitally coloured chalk plates, and countless other workshop secrets of his craft. Yet he is equally capable of miracles when armed with nothing but a single graphite pencil. Most of his recent works he calls ‘heliogravures’ – a process he describes, with his characteristic self-irony and a touch of English understatement, as “a simplified etching.” Knowing the refinement of his plates and the infinite precision of his minute, interwoven lines, we can hardly believe that anything about them is simple. In all his works – despite their elegance – we sense the humility, patience, and sheer labour invested in them. Such qualities are not, perhaps, the most fashionable today. […]

Every one of István Orosz’s prints speaks of what is and is not, what seems not to be and yet is, what cannot be seen and yet is visible. He catches, from the boundless river of art history, his own golden fish: trompe l’oeil and anamorphosis, the tricks of deception, of bodily and formal transformation, of appearance and the art of illusion. […]

All his works demand attentive contemplation. At first glance, everything appears in perfect order in Az én napom, a te napod (My Sun, Your Sun, 2001, heliogravure) – until we notice that the two sundials carved on the same stone wall show different times: the upper and the lower, each exquisitely drawn with a radiant sunbeam at its centre, diverge. How can that be? And in our divided world, we may also ponder the underlying philosophy of the title itself. Reflection is a prerequisite when we approach Orosz’s art, since reflection is his fundamental attitude as well.

In A sziget (The Island, 1993, heliogravure), we see only the legs of a meditative artist sitting cross-legged – and a miracle occurs: opposite him, in the sea, the rocky island too sits cross-legged, while the waves of time lap around them both.

Columns

One of the recurrent destinations of István Orosz’s time travels is Greco-Roman antiquity, from which he has drawn one of his favourite motifs – the column – with which he engages in peculiar visual games. At first glance, all seems well in Oszlopok (lit. Columns, 1992, etching): from the ground rise sturdy, square pillars which, halfway up, suddenly transform into slender columns that sprout from nothing and line up in mid-air in a manner utterly impossible – for they do not, in fact, exist. Or do they? Among them float Greek letters spelling Utis – Nobody, the name used by the resourceful Odysseus in his battle with the one-eyed Cyclops, so that, once Odysseus had blinded him, the monster could not denounce his assailant. This is also Orosz’s artistic pseudonym. It may be taken to mean that, in his works, he relishes contending with those who have too few eyes to truly see. And he always wins. Columns march through many of his prints, dazzling our sight – as in Santo Stefano Rotondo Paraphrase III. (2000, etching), where apparently existent yet non-existent columns cast shadows over straying sheep. “Sic transit gloria mundi” – thus passes the glory of the world, thus passes time, and all else within time, the print seems to whisper.

In Mitológia I. Tölgy (lit. Mythology I. Oak, 1994, heliogravure), the stump of a felled tree splits the paving stones of a colonnade, yet its foliage still hovers in the air, prising apart the architrave’s stone cornice. The ruins are overgrown by the garden of time – one of Orosz’s favourite spiritual refuges.

Gardens and Labyrinths

Old gardens, dream gardens, emblems of time, appear in abundance throughout his drawings: among fallen leaves a swan glides across a garden pond in A hattyú (lit. The Swan, 1996, etching); its reflection swims in the opposite direction, while columns that have grown from nothing dissolve into nothing in the water’s mirror, fractured into a thousand trembling ripples.

And in those old gardens, there is always a labyrinth – a rich and essential motif in Orosz’s art. In Terasz (Terrace, 2008, ink and digitally coloured chalk plate), the artist sits with his back to us on a garden chair; in place of his head we see the cerebral convolutions drawn on the sheet in his lap. Beyond the terrace railing lies a hedged maze – its twin, its analogy. As ever, the drawing is multilayered and many-voiced.

Why does the labyrinth return so often in his work – the clipped mazes of Baroque gardens, the geometric patterns of Roman mosaic floors, the stone labyrinth of Theseus in Crete, that ancient image symbolising the path from life to death, and the bewilderment of existence itself? He writes:

“The possibility of getting lost, the awareness that we may at any moment make the wrong choice – this is what makes wandering in the labyrinth at once beautiful and despairing. To step through the gate of the labyrinth is to step out of time, to tear oneself from the world, to accept solitude, and to yield to the unknown powers of destiny – to its severity or its grace. But wandering in the labyrinth is also a cultural lesson and an intellectual adventure. Those who undertake it may feel they are unwinding Ariadne’s thread together with Plato and Dante, with the cathedral-building Freemasons and with Piranesi, Gaudí and Picasso.”
(A lerajzolt idő [The Drawn Time], Tiara Press, 2008)

Rejtett arcok (Hidden Faces)

In a certain sense, István Orosz may be regarded as a spiritual kinsman of Ovid. Rome’s ‘poeta laureatus’, two millennia ago, wrote his fifteen-book masterpiece Metamorphoses, on the shape-shifting tales of Greco-Roman mythology. It begins: “My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms” (translation by Frank Justus Miller). A similar impulse seems to move Orosz when he draws a forest of masterfully twisted hollow trees and the dark, story-dense tangle of their leaves and branches; for when we half-close our eyes, a miracle occurs: out of the interwoven limbs emerges the portrait of a young Dürer, gazing at us as from his self-portrait in Madrid’s Prado Museum, across half a millennium (Dürer az erdőben [Dürer in the Forest], 1987, heliogravure).

To wander among Orosz’s works is like exploring the ‘Kunst und Wunderkammer’ – the Cabinets of Art and Curiosities – of old palaces, filled with everything from stuffed crocodiles and saints’ relics to Damascus steel blades and Rembrandt portraits. His graphics offer a feast for connoisseurs and, at the same time, an intellectual ordeal: they are crowded with art-historical references, hidden correspondences, and the thrill of treasure-hunting.

We hear the rippling and chiming of Liszt’s music – that which he composed for the fountains of the Villa d’Este – in the print Tivoliszt (TivoLiszt, 1990, heliogravure). And behold, above the tiered fountains of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, near Rome, with its antique statuary fragments, Franz Liszt’s stern yet beautiful face appears – if we but squint. Orosz salutes the old masters through the virtuosity of his hidden portraits, a genre once practised by Arcimboldo, the sixteenth-century Italian painter who composed his grotesque heads out of fruits, strange objects, and twisted roots. Orosz similarly pays homage to the Dutch artist Maurits Escher, twentieth-century master of impossible spaces: in Escher Itáliában (Escher in Italy, 1987, heliogravure), from an Italian alley there rises – if we half-close our eyes – Escher’s face like a curious moon. And there, too, in the alley walks a mysterious figure in a pullover, holding a drawing folder marked “Utis”.

A bolondok hajója (lit. The Ship of Fools)

For more than two decades, Orosz’s portfolio has been steadily filled with drawings inspired by the satirical poem Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), written in 1497 by the learned German jurist Sebastian Brant and published in Basel. In that blunt, voluminous work, human follies and sins are represented by 111 fools, each placed on a ship bound for their imagined homeland. The first edition was illustrated by no lesser master than Albrecht Dürer.

Orosz approaches this celebrated book – which had an immense impact across Europe – with graphic brilliance. In his numerous small heliogravures, a throng of figures crowds into tiny spaces: swirling, pressing, dancing, intertwining, and separating again – ships upon the sea, God the Father in the heavens, a lascivious couple in a bathing tub, wondrous gardens and labyrinths, man-devouring wells, quack doctors and their prone patients, sanctimonious hypocrites and drunken wastrels, preening knights and bare-bottomed tavern nymphs, bookworm scholars and horoscope-crafting alchemists, carousals, sermons, owls and books – those symbols of wisdom – all gathered together in beautifully heavy leather bindings, their pages fluttering like wings.

It is a virtuoso depiction of life and death, and of that which remains unchanged, behind shifting costumes and stage sets, over five hundred years: human nature itself. Yet this seeming tumult is composed of many disciplined, superbly structured compositions – for if we half-close our eyes, on every sheet appears the ultimate destination of human paths: the “memento mori”, the skull, the “hidden face” we prefer to forget. Into this philosophical framework, with the gesture of a twenty-first-century artist, István Orosz reimagines the old work. […]

Anamorphoses

Among the visual riddles and optical puzzles devised by István Orosz are his anamorphoses. This rare artistic heritage, carried forward by only a few masters through the centuries, derives from a word that means “transformation” but also “distortion”. In Shakespeare Színház (lit. The Shakespeare Theatre, 1987, heliogravure) we see the timber-built Globe Theatre, with its circular stage, actors, gentlemen and ladies, onlookers, and a painter-chronicler seated with his back to the scene he is recording – for he works from imagination. Yet when we move to the side or tilt the print, we perceive what he is truly painting: from the stage wings of the Globe there assembles the image of the “Swan of Avon” himself, the portrait of Director Shakespeare.

In Dinteville anamorfózis (Dinteville Anamorphosis, 2005, heliogravure) we may wonder whose hand we see measuring with a compass – Orosz’s own, perhaps, or that of Jean de Dinteville, the learned nobleman from Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors (1533). The print alludes to Holbein’s hidden skull, which in the painting appears as a shapeless blur at the ambassadors’ feet but, seen from the proper angle, resolves into a ‘memento mori’. Contemporary notes record that “memento mori” – “remember you must die” – was also Dinteville’s personal motto. And when we step aside before Dinteville Anamorphosis, the sheet of drawing instruments – compass, music scrolls, razor blades – suddenly unfolds into a face: that of Dinteville, French ambassador in London, in the year 1533.

What should we look at, and from where? Which is the true point of view? These are the questions Orosz explores in his large-scale spatial works as well, such as his walkable stair sculptures (Lépcső 1–4. [lit. Staircase 1–4.], 1992, acrylic paintings). The painted and drawn fragments of body and leg on the steps come together to form complete figures only from one specific viewpoint; otherwise they are amorphous patches – an anamorphosis of the type that reveals its hidden image only when the spectator changes position.

Another, equally intriguing group of Orosz’s works requires a mirrored cylinder or cone to be placed at the centre of the sheet, within which the “solution” – the previously hidden image – emerges. The anamorphosis is one of Orosz’s grandest enchantments. Through it he can make the sea withdraw from the mosaic floor of Atlantis, return Theseus and the Minotaur to the Cretan labyrinth, or cause the mysterious face of the Sphinx to appear, shimmering between two pyramids in the heat of the desert air.

A particularly beautiful early piece is Verne Gyula anamorfózis (Jules Verne Anamorphosis, 1983, offset print with copper cylinder). In a polar landscape of snow-covered rocks, ice floes and shipwrecked shorelines, if we place a mirrored cylinder in precisely the right spot, the portrait of Jules Verne materialises within it. […]

In a later print (2006, heliogravure), the artist is shown bent over his drawing table: a dark bird-silhouette lies across the sheet, surrounded by the artist’s tools – compass, pens, paintbox, rulers, spectacles, ornithological books, and in his hand a magnifying glass. When the mirror cylinder is set upon the paper, there appears, reflected, the face of the “poet of melancholy”, Edgar Allan Poe – for the title of the print is A holló, Edgar Allan Poe anamorfózis (The Raven – Edgar Allan Poe Anamorphosis).

Mirrors and Reflections

[…] Is it the mirror that enchants István Orosz, or does he himself weave enchantment through the mirror – or, rather, through the philosophical problem of reflection itself? In one of his prints, the artist steps into the mirror, ascending his favourite motif, the staircase – but where does it lead? Perhaps to the fifteenth-century Netherlands, to another of his works (Johannes de Eyck fuit hic [Johannes de Eyck was here], 1998–99, heliogravure), to the home of the merchant Arnolfini, whom Jan van Eyck has just painted with his wife. In the famous painting, behind the couple, the circular mirror reflects the artist himself; but in Orosz’s etching, the painter has already departed. The host looks after him through an open door – yet the door itself seems a mere stage prop, a puppet-theatre screen in an empty room. Arnolfini appears only in the mirror image of the door – if he is there at all. The print’s title repeats the Latin inscription seen above the mirror in Van Eyck’s painting: Johannes de Eyck fuit hic, 1434 – “Jan van Eyck was here, 1434.” It is a play of temporal mirrors, an old image reflected within a new one – much as in Velazquez spectaculum (1998, heliogravure).

The title and the composition themselves play on the kinship between ‘spectaculum’ (spectacle) and ‘speculum’ (mirror). In the original painting, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656), the little Infanta of the Spanish royal court stands surrounded by her attendants. Orosz transposes her into the present, multiplying her as a gentle chess piece upon a chequered floor, mirrored endlessly. He brings her the translucent shadow of her beloved dog, leaves behind Velázquez, the court painter, the royal couple reflected in the background mirror, and the court ladies – but summons into our time the dark-clad, mysterious man who stands in the doorway at the back. Is he a reflection too? Silence reigns over the print – that particular stillness so characteristic of Orosz – within which one seems to hear the lines of the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky: “Who is here, who is present, / who observes, and whom?”.

Architectural Paradoxes

Man and woman face each other and yet do not meet in Terasz – Te és Én (Terrace – You and Me, 2001, heliogravure). But where, in fact, are they? There is such a building – and there is not. The balustrade of the terrace runs as it could not possibly run, the wall turns where no wall could turn, the windows open where no windows could open, engulfed in a sea of wild vine. In these architectural paradoxes Orosz gleefully subverts the greatest achievement of the Renaissance masters he so reveres – perspective. His constructions are characterised by an impossible logic: they cannot exist, and yet they do.

In A könyvtár (The Library, 1992, heliogravure), a Gothic, stone-framed window stands both inside and outside the wall, opening outward and inward at once; floor-tiles rise on edge, stacking into space; the draughtsman leans on the sill as if gazing outward – but where to, in truth? Perhaps back in time, toward that eighteenth-century Italian architect-engraver he esteems so highly, the strange master of fantastic cityscapes and imaginary prisons, whose bust in another print looks out from the window of a Roman palazzo – or perhaps from a tenement palace on Budapest’s Andrássy Avenue, where the rusticated corner of the façade turns inward so vertiginously it makes us dizzy (Piranesi Budapesten [Piranesi in Budapest], 1994, heliogravure).

He also draws virtuosic “absences”. In one sheet of the Hiány (Absence) series – Hiány II. Akvadukt (Absence II. Aqueduct, 2003, heliogravure) – the long-stretching stone wall of the Roman aqueduct, with its arched openings, is gone; what remains are the curved fragments, standing like peculiar gravestones on the flat plain. As we stare, the aqueduct reassembles itself before our eyes – though we know it is not there, and yet it is. In Hiány III. Pantheon (Absence III. Pantheon, 2004, heliogravure), we both see and do not see the portico with its columns and pediment: the spaces between the columns have become solid walls, yet the white void of sky still outlines the entrance. We grow dizzy looking at Hiány V. Kupola (Absence V. Dome, 2006, heliogravure), where only curved wall fragments float in the air, while deep below, in the well of time, stands the artist himself. He often appears in his own works, as Velázquez and others painted themselves into their canvases, as Hitchcock walked through each of his films at least once. There stands the time-traveller, gazing upward at the dome – which both exists and does not.

His walls and constructions often rise into the air […] drawn with meticulous care and exquisitely fine lines. They are fragments of buildings – window frames, wall corners – belonging to structures that could not exist in reality. Dreams of houses, of architecture, of geometry, of space and time – all of them hovering above reality like the flying castles of fairy tales.

Deszkametriák (Boardometries)

From the 2010s onwards, István Orosz began translating his constructions of real yet unreal walls into wood – lifting them out of the illusionistic, etched space of paper and into actual space, or perhaps only into the illusion of it. In his Deszkametriák (Boardometries), he creates perforated, spatial bodies from strips of differently toned, time-weathered wood. We are tempted to touch them, to let our fingers explore their recesses – but there is nowhere to enter: these are shallow reliefs, mere one or two centimetres deep. They are the refined embodiments of geometrical trompe l’oeil. And, inevitably, they touch with cheerful ease upon one of the major avant-garde tendencies of the twentieth century – Constructivism.

Posters

Amid the largely monochrome sea of his graphic prints, Orosz’s posters appear as bright, boisterous islands – yet islands served by regular ferries, for the two realms are in constant communication. The engraving-like delicacy of his draughtsmanship permeates the posters; the elegant black-and-white linework is fused with the vibrant chromatic impact of avant-garde painting, producing a striking alloy of wit and precision.

His posters and poster designs are fireworks of absurd invention. On one, a pencil – gutted, exhausted, yet defiant – takes off like a rocket from a barren, frozen land (1978); on another, a pencil bent and tortured but unbroken, its spine resilient (1989). Both seem bitterly wise reflections on the condition of artistic freedom in the 1970s and 1980s. […]

The gesture of the Apostle Thomas comes to mind in the poster for Karamazovok (The Karamazovs, 1992): two hands, one seemingly reaching to touch Christ’s wounds – yet the wound opens in the other hand, or is it indeed Christ’s own, with the dreadful, torn-edged aperture of the crucifixion? Is it a symbol of the self-tormenting search for God in The Brothers Karamazov – and in Dostoevsky himself?

A spectacular flock of moustaches soars across the ocean on the exhibition poster for the Budapest History Museum, titled Magyarok az Újvilágban (Hungarians in the New World, 1992). And then there is the emblematic classic of the regime change: Tovarisi, konyec! (1989) – or, in István Orosz’s own, more elegant formulation, Tovarisi, adieu! – showing the fat nape of a departing Soviet officer. It became an indelible emblem of the political transition, a cult image in its genre, just as István, a király (Stephen, the King, the 1983 rock opera) became a cult work in Hungarian rock music. […]

Films

Another island within Orosz István’s oeuvre – one that, like his posters, is not truly an island at all – is the group of his animated films. His graphic motifs have free passage into these works, only here they come alive and begin to move. Transformation remains a central motif, but while in the Hidden Faces or Anamorphoses series the metamorphosis occurs through the viewer’s squint, movement, shift of perspective, or the placement of a mirrored cylinder, in the films these spatial and planar transitions unfold before our eyes through the magic of animation itself. Amid the sea of contemporary animation – much of it cluttered with graphic debris – Orosz’s films are islands of craftsmanship: each frame far more than a transitional drawing, standing on its own as a refined, complete work of graphic art. […]

In A sótartó felé (Towards the Salt Cellar, 1979), a guest at a ghastly family dinner – a real dinner, performed by amateur actors – suddenly crosses into a drawn world: the crumpled tablecloth becomes a desolate, snow-covered landscape, and the saltcellar to be reached turns into a lighthouse. In Ah, Amerika! (Ah, America!, 1984), documentary photographs of Hungarian peasant emigrants posing before the Statue of Liberty in New York are woven together with etched animation: the sea ripples like a print, the ships that brought them to the Promised Land emit plumes of smoke. It is a poignant fusion of historical documentation and graphic imagination.

In Vigyázat, lépcső! (Mind the Steps!, 1989), Sisyphus-like furniture movers haul a wardrobe up and down a stairwell that expands terrifyingly, while a small boy looks on as the stairs race and rattle like train tracks, and a tenement’s stairwell transforms into an absurd historical space. In A kert (The Garden, 1993), the same boy wanders into a strange garden, follows the shadow of a mysterious woman in a wheelchair into an old house, and sees – or perhaps dreams – the lady swimming out as a mermaid, startling the goldfish in the garden pool.

Orosz gathers and weaves together his key motifs in his masterly, etching-style synthesis Time Sights (2004), perhaps the most complete summation of his graphic and animated art. The film’s motto quotes William Blake: “Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female; Time is a man, Space is a woman.” A male voice – Orosz’s own – and a female voice softly recite reflections on Time. Leaves fall like seconds passing into water; the artist walks his beloved staircases among his columns grown from air; a boat glides over a translucent mosaic labyrinth; wind turns the pages of a book left open on a terrace; in the glass mirror of a laid-down watch birds take flight; the little boy has grown up – the one who watched in the stairwell, who wandered in the garden.

And his face, it seems, reappears for a moment in Sakk (Chess, 2010), a sharply drawn, scratchy, historical absurdity that is itself another kind of time travel: it reconstructs a chess match between Lenin and Bogdanov, two leaders of the Bolshevik Party. As the opening documentary photograph attests, the famous game took place in 1908 on the terrace of the villa of the exiled writer Maxim Gorky on the island of Capri.

For nearly four decades, István Orosz has been contemplating the passage of time, seeking answers to the same questions that art has already formulated in its many forms – from the magic of the first paint-smeared handprint on a cave wall to today’s laser installations. He is a thinker of high artistic rank, both in Hungary and internationally. To attain such rank, one must draw with the skill of the Renaissance masters, work with the humility of the medieval illuminators, and see as the Surrealists did – as the painters of strange dreams. And from this union arises an art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that is at once singular and mysterious. As is that of István Orosz. […]

The Hungarian poet János Pilinszky begins one of his poems with the line: “I invoke the impossible” (Alkohol [Alcolhol], translated by Géza Simon). That is what István Orosz does in every one of his works.

[2013] The complete study is available in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.