When examining the works of László Vinczeffy – whether oil paintings, graphics, sculptures or installations – we enter a peculiar, dreamlike world. His motionless, lunar landscapes, his repeatedly recurring forms and returning compositional structures evoke expressive visions of epochs long gone or not yet arrived, but in any case, cold, emptied and inhuman. “His works are characterised by dark tonalities, metallic surfaces, mysterious, enclosed yet ornate, gilded forms, and a peculiar unity of surrealism and minimalism.”[1] His instinctive draughtsmanship is forceful, his formal language unusual, his themes diverse, and he frequently employs symbols in his works (e.g. the Apokalipszis-sorozat [Apocalypse series]). In the second half of the 1980s, Vinczeffy created “this mode of vision, credible even in its gloom, which does not draw on anything from the seemingly Transylvanian myth; yet, because the tasks of the Transylvanian artist consist of a multiplicity of layers of perception and action […], he found a well-navigable path: he does not articulate by foregrounding local specificity, but places the local into a European, cultural-historical symbolic region, elevating the province’s complex of problems to the level of universality in order to reach the cosmopolitan recipient as well.”[2]
The artist, originally from Atyha in Harghita County, is by original profession a drawing teacher; he graduated in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) in 1970. Subsequently, for nearly a decade, he taught in Zágon (Zagon), the village of Kelemen Mikes, in Kovászna (Covasna) County. It was here that he began to take a more serious interest in painting, and it was also here that he held his first exhibition, followed by shows in Kovászna (Covasna) and, in 1973, an exhibition at the Museum of Kézdivásárhely (Târgu Secuiesc). At that time, he primarily produced portraits, above all depicting the weathered faces of elderly peasant men with strong, expressive colour handling; however, among his works from this period we also find root representations which, aside from their colouring, may be associated with the works of Endre Kusztos. During these years, he visited Hajdúböszörmény on several occasions, participating in the Hajdúsági Nemzetközi Művésztelep (Hajdúság International Artists’ Colony).
As the Romanian government of the time demanded the creation of works radiating cheerfulness and optimism, Vinczeffy resolved to ‘change his formal language’. His 1978 exhibition at the Korunk Gallery in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) achieved great success (although some still considered his style immature), and almost overnight the ‘mystical’ works of the solitary artist were mentioned among those of the finest contemporary creators. In connection with this exhibition, József Gazda wrote that Vinczeffy “lives in a village, not in the provinces, nor even in the backwater of the provinces, but in the backwater of the backwater of the provinces”. He further observed that “in the creative process, instinct plays an extremely strong role for him, often even at the expense of rationality and deliberation”. Vinczeffy did not wish to create still lifes, although, as he himself formulated: “I acknowledge the role of ‘dead nature’, but I wished to express the world around us more suggestively and more forcefully.” This is how ‘the first step of his painterly renewal’ was born, the series entitled A lovag álma (Középkori visszhang) (The Knight’s Dream (Medieval Echo)). These ‘dreams’ were medieval relics – at a distance of merely a step from the restorer’s daily work.
At the end of the decade, he became a painting restorer at the Székely Nemzeti Múzeum (Székely National Museum) in Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe). In parallel, between 1979 and 1983, he completed the restorer training programme at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. After returning home from the Romanian capital, he restored works from the Miklós Barabás Collection and paintings by Jenő Gyárfás. He worked at the museum until 2010; during the first decade of his activity there, his studio was located in the Gyárfás Jenő Emlékház (Jenő Gyárfás Memorial House).
The lighter tone characteristic of the 1980s – about which Árpád Farkas wrote that “they are permeated by a certain Renaissance charm, filled with surrealistic force, and rendered bizarre by a metaphysical vision”, and that “their objects, frozen into a separate existence, haunt the forms of perfection”[3] – changed in the 1990s. His earlier realism and human figures were replaced by dreamlike visions and motifs of bygone eras, while the materiality of his works gained particular significance.
By the end of the decade, in 1999, at his exhibition held at the Sepsiszentgyörgyi Képtár (Sfântu Gheorghe Art Gallery), he presented paintings, sculptures and drawings alike. Vinczeffy constructed the paintings with a spontaneity comparable to natural processes; on the sculptures, the characteristic spiked forms of drawings referring to natural structures and to the processes of decay and growth occurring in nature appeared, serving to connect and transmute the different qualities of space, negative and positive forms. “László Vinczeffy proceeds from basic motifs – house, tower, cross – from signs encompassing the possibilities and impossibilities of life and of establishing connections, which he nevertheless analyses and transforms through a literary approach, by initiating processes unfolding on the plane of vision. He reduces the colour world of his pictorial surfaces to a single base tone, so that the shades may appear all the more richly; the figure compacted into a basic form becomes saturated with emotional and intellectual content thanks to the richness of the facture.”[4]
Recently, he returned to his native village of Atyha – primarily in the hope of saving the settlement – and renovated two old houses, rescuing them from decay. In the village, he organised a meeting for the Hungarian Academy of Arts; in one of the houses, works by Lajos Páll, László Hunyadi, Vince Bocskai, Dénes Kuti, Endre Kusztos, Mihály Vargha, Csaba Sánta, Botond Kuti and Zsolt Siklódi were exhibited. The exhibition series hosted at the Kakasülő Gallery in Atyha has since become a local tradition. Vinczeffy’s activity as an organiser of artistic life is significant; he is an active member of such fine art organisations as the Union of Fine Artists of Romania, the Miklós Barabás Guild re-established in 1994, the Alliance of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists’ Associations, the National Association of Hungarian Creative Artists, and the Society of Hungarian Painters. He received the Pro Cultura Hungarica Award in 2006, the Munkácsy Award in 2008, and in 2009 he was honoured with the Hungarian Art Award. In 2010, he was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
In the garden of his estate, which he named Vidám kert (Joyful Garden), he erected life-sized wooden sculptures, ‘idea trees’. In these sculptures, he sought to realise the same aims as in his surreal pictorial visions.[5] Over the years, his painterly formal language became increasingly reduced, and this reduction also began to interest him in sculpture. He started collecting wood waste. “At first, I clung to the colour of the wood, occasionally playing into it with black, but afterwards I felt the need to paint the sculptures as well, to give them a good atmosphere. I work with strong colours, counting on the fact that in the long run these will fade and acquire a beautiful patina. But per sculpture I use only one or two colours: from black I move to white, then back from yellow to black, and red is also a favourite. Here and there blues appear as well; I work with these four or five colours,” he says in an interview.[6]
Alongside sculpture, he considers graphic art and painting equally important and wishes to practise them in parallel: “When one doesn’t work, I try the other – this is how I give myself a rest. My life will not become boring; drawing demands an entirely different world, painting another, sculpture yet another – each has its own path, and it is through these that I receive marvellous experiences.”
By his own admission, cinema struck him like a blow to the head; the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky particularly captivated him. “Bergman, with his sequences that magnify the tremors of the soul into screams and shouts – when one strips oneself naked spiritually as well. Then Tarkovsky, in the way he projects before us, with a unified vision, the mysticism of icons and the soulless emptiness of the coming century.”[7] This atmosphere radiates from his paintings as well.
No one could summarise the essence of his fine art and his creative method better than he himself: “In my graphic works, structures found in nature, transformed forms and objects inspire me, and these become embedded in a surreal world. Over the past fifteen years, my compositions depicting humans and objects have gradually been replaced by simple and purified forms built upon an axis of symmetry. My painting technique has changed: I apply a thick binding medium to the canvas, to which I add sand, cement, marble and stone powder, as well as plastic granulate. I work this mass with palette knives so as to achieve a repetitive texture. I further intensify this with gestural lines that increase the inner tension of the image. After drying, I paint the resulting surfaces with a base colour, then enrich them with its shades. Through this, my pictures are strengthened and charged with emotional content. I would like to lead the viewers of my paintings away from habitual everyday seeing towards a direction where, through my works, they can identify with the silence suggesting a sacred atmosphere that induces meditation. I want them thereby to come into possession of mysterious emotions of which I myself was also a participant.”
Some compare his style to the surrealist paintings of Dalí; he himself, however, does not feel this parallel to be justified. Among the works of other fine artists, the greatest impact on him was Rembrandt’s A tékozló fiú hazatérése (The Return of the Prodigal Son), upon seeing which he realised that it contains “not only the human being, but also the external world surrounding and determining him – inseparably.”[8]
In April 2014, the Kárpát-haza Gallery (Carpathian Homeland Gallery) organised an exhibition of works by László Vinczeffy. “The series of paintings seen at the exhibition is extraordinarily unified; on almost every piece an emblematic motif placed at the centre appears – sometimes a gate, sometimes a hybrid being resembling a human figure or bust yet object-like in nature – a fantasy object emerging from the depths of the psyche, simultaneously concrete, appearing in its definite bodily reality, yet more closely indefinable, reminiscent of armour, helmets, cloaks and altars, flashing brightly from the sombrely darkening atmosphere. […] The hieratic, symmetrical forms and metallic surfaces are at once distant, frightening, aggressive and protective.”[9] The texture of his figures is sometimes highly unusual, and despite their reduced colour palette, they remain varied. His painting Az ünnepelt (The Celebrated) appears as if covered with snakeskin; in Megidézés (Invocation) he seems to depict armour clad in skin; while the surface of his 2013 work Kapu (Gate), for instance, resembles an integrated circuit. An essential element of his most recent works is the gate motif, which promises the possibility of entering a parallel world.
According to his own account, he experiences the ecstasy of creation by paying attention to and relying upon the promptings of his instincts. In the course of this, he encounters surprises that even he himself cannot explain. “It is certain that during the creation of a work I encounter feelings that bring about and cause both suffering and fulfilled happiness.”
[1] http://www.nski.hu/vinczeffy-laszlo-kiallitasa.html
[2] Márton Simó, Üzenet időtlen télből (lit. Message from a Timeless Winter), Kapu, 1991/2.
[3] Árpád Farkas, Igaz Szó, 1989.
[4] Napi Magyarország, 12 January 2000, p. 13.
[5] Áron Tóbiás, A festő nem feledi gyökereit [lit. The Painter Does Not Forget His Roots]. Műtermében az elhagyott világ jelképei [lit. Symbols of the Abandoned World in His Studio], Magyar Nemzet, 8 September 1993, p. 11.
[6] Visszatérés [lit. Return]. Vinczeffy László atyhai elvonulása [lit. László Vinczeffy’s Retreat in Atyha].
http://www.3szek.ro/load/cikk/67562/visszateres_vinczeffy_laszlo_atyhai_elvonulasa
[7] Áron Tóbiás, A festő nem feledi gyökereit [lit. The Painter Does Not Forget His Roots]. Műtermében az elhagyott világ jelképei [lit. Symbols of the Abandoned World in His Studio], Magyar Nemzet, 8 September 1993, p. 11.
[8] Áron Tóbiás, A festő nem feledi gyökereit [lit. The Painter Does Not Forget His Roots]. Műtermében az elhagyott világ jelképei [lit. Symbols of the Abandoned World in His Studio], Magyar Nemzet, 8 September 1993, p. 11.
[9] János Sturcz, A lélek védelmének eszközei (Vinczeffy László festményeiről) (lit. The Instruments of the Soul’s Defence (On the Paintings of László Vinczeffy)), Vinczeffy László, Painter from Székely Land, Kárpát-haza Gallery, Budapest, 2014.