Timelines and soil layers
József Baksai (1957) graduated in painting at the College of Fine Arts (now: Hungarian University of Fine Arts) (1985–1990), with Lajos Sváby as his mentor. During his studies, he was influenced by German painters such as Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, and Francis Bacon. He also studied in Paris, Luxembourg, and Rome. Baksai has received awards including the Derkovits Scholarship (1990–1993), the Studio of Young Artists Scholarship (1993), and the Hungarian Academy in Rome Scholarship (1994). Other prizes include the Oszkár Galtz Prize (1989), the Barcsay Prize (1994), and the Munkácsy Prize (2001). Besides painting, he works in graphic art. He mainly works in series, exploring a theme in depth.
He reconnects with the ancient roots of art and artistic creation. For him, the image, like for his ‘colleagues’ of thousands of years, is as real as the forces of nature. It is important not because it is fun to look at, but because it can be used and has mysterious powers. The image is, therefore, a tool of magic, and the process of making the image is identified with creation.
When Baksai paints a picture, he recreates the material at his disposal, which becomes a medium. The material, the matter – whether it is oil paint applied in thick layers, breathable graphite, or even loose watercolour – embodies the thoughts he wishes to express, creating a link between some higher substance and the artist, as well as between the artist and the viewers observing the works.
DUALITY
The keyword in József Baksai’s art is duality. On the one hand, it manifests itself in his creative method, the subjects he depicts and the techniques he uses. On the other hand, his paintings also include figures from ancient mythology, motifs from ancient Greek, Egyptian and Cretan stories, as well as symbolic figures from the Old and New Testaments. He often depicts figures that simultaneously refer to profane and sacred content.
This dichotomy is reinforced by his associative method of work. Namely, József Baksai never explicitly states only what he intends to express. In other words, in addition to the primary content, all his works are accompanied by another, apparently contradictory interpretation. The viewer is guided by the associative links among the displayed elements to discover moments essential to the artist but not immediately obvious. However, philosophical speculation is not necessary to understand his works, since he guides the receptive process, among other things, through titles and his method of association, which evokes complementary concepts.
Therefore, in Baksai’s art, we can observe (seemingly) contradictory moments. For example, alongside his huge oil paintings, built up from thick layers of paint, he constantly creates fine pencil drawings. His latest series, which has been expanding steadily since 2009, consists of small, mainly watercolour-based paintings.
Accordingly, the other apparent contradiction lies in the difference between his paintings and his graphic works. The graphic works are delicate pencil drawings or loose watercolours, transparent collages characterised by a restrained use of colour. In contrast, his paintings are compositions with a rustic surface, expressive in effect, often using contrasting colours. But of course, all this seems contradictory only at first glance. One of the fundamental parallels between his paintings and graphic works is thematic consistency. The other one is the identity of the same process of creation, since in both cases, the facture is formed by layers added one on top of the other. However, while in drawings, watercolours, and collages, the surface of the picture is formed by the stacking of tiny, breath-like pencil traces, fine brushstrokes, or translucent tracing membranes, in oil paintings, he creates a rustic image surface from thick clumps of paint. There are, therefore, more similarities than differences between the two techniques. Yet the resulting works have a radically different effect.
The key to resolving this contradiction is the artist, who, like his images, also plays a mediating role. He is a mediator, that is, he both connects and separates these contradictory yet essentially common methods and contents.
József Baksai’s oil paintings already confuse us when we try to define them in terms of genre. Painting-plastics or plastic painting? Basically, neither nor both at the same time. This genre dichotomy is easiest to resolve, since József Baksai is a painter par excellence. Traditionally, he works in the genre of panel painting, and with his factural solutions, he also innovates this traditional technique. All surface solutions that result in relief-like fractures should and can be interpreted in this context. Although it is undeniable that his works indicate the interaction of artistic disciplines and genres and the dissolution of their boundaries, his creative approach and attitude are fundamentally based on the problematic of painting. For him, the primary concern is to capture and visually depict colours, lights, materials, and immaterial and incorporeal phenomena that are not or only partially perceptible to our senses. The details that protrude from the picture’s surface are also composed exclusively of paint and serve primarily to (literally) emphasise the accentuated elements. At the same time, the details in Baksai’s works that really step out into space also polemicise against trompe-l’œil painting. He almost builds up the figures on the canvas, layering the paint stacks several times until the desired thickness is achieved. His creative method thus requires careful attention to structure and stability, so that the seemingly spontaneous, organic surfaces result from a duality of careful planning and randomness. In these oil compositions, he plays with spatiality in a way that often leaves us unsure whether the pictorial element is actually protruding or ‘just’ painted. If we are familiar with his painting method, we take it for granted that the painting’s surface is plastic, and then, as we get closer, the true face of the work is revealed. This plastic play is also one of the many seemingly extreme features of Baksai’s art.
TIMELINES
One of the fundamental questions of our existence is to define and understand temporal boundaries. We desperately try to grasp time, to define ourselves in the flow of time, and to locate ourselves within the interval marked by transience and eternity. To place in the ‘big picture’ the age in which we live. One of the fundamental themes of József Baksai’s art is time, relations between past, present, and future.
The turning back to the past in contemporary art is a sign of the times – a sign of the crisis, the labyrinths, and the traps of contemporary art trends, which have been degraded to fashion – and a sign that there is no progress without tradition, and tradition is the basis of development.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Baksai’s early works were characterised by archaising surface solutions, and thematically he also worked with memories and traces of bygone eras, as his titles suggest: Lelet (lit. Find) (1989, and three more paintings with this title in 1998), Vaskor (lit. Iron Age) (1989), Vissza (lit. Back) (1990), and Torzó (lit. Torso) (1992). The paintings Oüsszeusz (lit. Odysseus) (1989) and Utazás (lit. Journey) (1989), painted in the same year, also refer to a relationship with time in this context.
Another means of archaising is the incorporation of quotations from the works of masters of earlier periods; for example, the compositional order of Rembrandt’s painting Slaughtered Ox, which he uses and reworks in relation to the theme of the Crucifixion, or László Mednyánszky’s Csavargófej (lit. Head of a Tramp) in his painting Kő (lit. Stone).
The past, present, and future are linked in two paintings titled XXX. század (lit. 20th Century) (1989). Or in the triptych Út – Remény – Gyász (lit. Road–Hope–Mourning) (2006) and in the graphic Út (lit. Road) (2002), which can be seen as a predecessor to the three paintings, where the figures (child, woman/mother, death/mourning) appear on a single canvas.
His working method, along with the mood and power of his images, evokes the magical world of ancient and indigenous peoples. Looking at the structure of Baksai’s paintings, the connection between the substance of the two modes of representation becomes clearer. The formal similarities stem from the same intent in content. Both the structured imagery on the walls of the prehistoric caves and the pictorial surfaces shaped by the painter are dominated by a primordial instinct. Cave paintings show figures floating in ‘functionally’ arranged spaces that are ‘empty’ in relation to the wall surfaces, while in Baksai’s paintings, symbolic figures are arranged in metaphysical spaces and arranged as signs in transcendental compositions. The effect produced is very similar, even though different conscious moments contributed to shaping it. It is as if tens of thousands of years were not stretched between the representations. Each is timeless and future-proof. Time is one of the concepts that both connects and separates these prehistoric and contemporary works.
In the formation of the facture, the aforementioned layering, with its stacked paint clusters, also evokes geological processes. There is no single point of rest on the rustic surface of his paintings; the gestural, swirling layers of paint that protrude and collapse evoke geological movements. The stacking of layers of paint and plastic, in form and relief, is likewise reminiscent of geological processes. Wreckage, decay, and ruined surfaces are also synonymous with time in Baksai’s paintings and prints. In his earlier prints, he achieved a worn or damaged effect through staining, gestural line structures in surface formation, and by repeatedly using a crumpled sheet of paper as a basis, or by creating surfaces with a crumpled effect through printmaking, which also suggests the constructive and destructive work of time. Wrinkled and creased, as well as tattered and layered surfaces, are thus primarily symbolic of the process of time in the art of József Baksai.
One of the characteristic motifs of József Baksai’s oeuvre is the vanitas metaphor, which is also fundamentally linked to time. The word vanitas, which appears already in the Old Testament, refers to the futility, worthlessness, and transience of earthly things. In the Middle Ages, vanitas became increasingly important. The skull (or death’s head) is the most important vanitas symbol. On the other hand, elements that indicate the continuity of time (e.g., hourglass, spider’s web, building ruins) and motifs that confront impermanence (e.g. mirror, wilting flowers, soap bubbles) refer to vanitas in the imagery of different periods.
Vanitas is the subject of several of Baksai’s paintings (Vanitas 2002) and prints (Vanitas 1994, 1996, 2003), and is represented by one of the most common and important vanitas symbols, the skull. He associates Vanitas with human remains stripped to the bone, thereby evoking the metaphor of time.
ASSOCIATIVE CONTEMPLATION
In his series, József Baksai often incorporates stories from ancient times, especially Greek mythology. This choice of subject matter again contains an element of archaism, but, of course, the depiction of ancient legends and their characters goes beyond it. Baksai – and here again we must refer to his method of association – repeatedly depicts the minor characters of the stories in his paintings and prints. He usually refers to mythological events or to what, at first sight, seem insignificant or less important moments. In this way, he draws attention to the fact that the essence is in the details. On the other hand, it presents thematic elements, characters, and symbols that, in addition to their ancient mythological interpretation, often also have sacral content.
In addition to the primary layer of meaning, each of József Baksai’s works is accompanied by another, seemingly opposite interpretation. Baksai guides the receptive process through his method of association, which evokes complementary concepts. This duality – the apparently contradictory yet mutually presupposing moments – characterises his entire oeuvre and permeates his 2005 series Vita activa. The very title of the series, Vita activa (‘active life’), in fact evokes the term ‘vita contemplativa’ (‘contemplative life’). The reception of József Baksai’s paintings presupposes a method of image association, the essence of which is the evocation of the absent, the absent through its complementary counterpart. He strives to evoke the association of the contrasting pair of concepts and thus induce the reception of the real content. In this case, alongside vita activa and vita contemplativa, light and darkness, outside and inside, below and above, fire and water, air and earth, soul and body, are these organically interconnected relations that spring from a common source, that appear to be pandanas and opposites of each other, but cannot be understood without each other, that cannot exist.
Almost all of József Baksai’s oeuvre explores the duality of life and death, but some paintings and series address this issue concretely. Tot (1991) shows the head of a dead man lying on the ground in a nearby cut-out. Painted in brownish colours, the composition objectifies the fact of death.
In the diptych Mors et vita (lit. Life and Death) (2000), he links life and death to the moment of birth and death. On the large black canvas, a tiny child appears. In the representation of the ages of human existence, children symbolise the beginning or early stages of life. The child symbolises continuity, the future and life itself (vita). In Baksai’s painting, the colour black, as a symbol of mourning, evokes death (mors). The motif of the moment of birth, the association of the infants with black, and the evocation of burial suggest the duality of the beginning and the end, and of the end and the beginning of something. In his painting Stigmák (lit. Stigmata) (2000), painted the same year, the five red roses symbolising the wounds of Christ also appear on a black background.
His 2008 series, Block 11, is an integral part of his creative process, including his exploration of the duality of life and death, as discussed in this article. However, it is not only the subject matter that links these paintings directly to the earlier ones, but also the working method, in which the artist creates rustic surfaces with thick clumps of paint. These relief paintings, made solely from paint, are mostly shaped by hand, without brushes or other intermediary tools. It is this technical solution that gives rise to the aforementioned duality of genre in his works. Despite the spatial highlights, his works remain fundamentally and clearly within the realm of painting.
This series made the basement of Vajda Studio a place of remembrance when it was first presented in 2008. For it recalls. The temporal horizons. The (tragic) historical past. The present moment. Our personal future. Memento mori! Reminds us of death.
His 2013 series is called Ihung-bzed, i.e. begging pots. It is not only a tool for begging but also for meditating monks. Therefore, all pictures are about one thing: the process of inner purification, meditation.
In Baksai’s paintings, the blood-filled meditation object is a symbol of the body, which, freed from its spiritual and mental weight, floats, swims, wobbles, and topples over, even more vulnerable. The images in the series are mostly arranged in pairs. The two extreme forms of representation, the miniature transparent paintings (watercolours, delicate pencil drawings, self-collages) and the oil paintings composed of large, pastose piles of paint, have always coexisted in parallel in the art of József Baksai. Here, he worked on the same theme, idea, or poem quotation in both small and large versions and displayed them in a common exhibition space, revealing their different relations, similarities, and differences. The vessel is also linked to other symbolic elements in the works, and in this way, its nuanced layers of meaning amplify one another’s symbolism. Thus, the moon, a symbol of eternal change and circulation, or the snake in the painting entitled Örök (lit. Eternal), a symbol of healing and death (poison), or of the eternal and renewal. In 1993, Baksai painted a cycle of paintings entitled Grál (lit. Grail) (Grail I–IV.1993), but the pieces are not chalices but pairs of open palms. I believe that it is partly the “missing” chalices from these paintings that appear in the Ihung-bzed paintings. The vessels of blood in the compositions of the series, sometimes floating in a metaphysical medium, or suspended in rippling water (Csésze I. [lit. Cup I] – Cruor), or tipping (Alkony [lit. Twilight]) or overturning (Est [lit. Evening] – Ocassus), primarily evoke the association of the grail, with all its metaphorical connotations.
TRANSPARENT LAYERS
József Baksai’s series of small-scale watercolour–pencil–collage paintings, which created a new system, began in 2009 with the first series of over one hundred paintings. These small, palm-sized paintings, produced continuously since then, are essentially watercolours but are sometimes complemented by pencil drawings or glued-on details. Some of them are self-collages, watercolours combined with letters, tearing and tracing paper. As I have already mentioned, like his oil paintings, these miniatures are characterised by their layering, which, along with variations in technique and scale, is a constant element of his art. The other is thematic consistency: as in some of his oil paintings and pencil drawings, these miniature paintings revisit essentially the same themes, using a slightly different technique from his earlier works. The recurring symbols in the paintings of this ongoing series cover a rich range of meanings. The skull, for example, appears in contexts ranging from the profane ritual of trepanation (skull-cutting) to the sacred site of the Calvary. The vessel appears in several interpretations – from the Morning Star awaiting the sunrise, through the Vacuum, to divine purity, to death (twilight) – and the serpent is both a symbol of the Immutable and of Mutatio (change). Other motifs, such as the rose, the fish, the fountain, the angel, and the colour red, also appear in several of his paintings, offering a rich range of associations. As we have come to expect from Baksai, the creator and constant factor in these works. Also recurring in these paintings are winged creatures, angels, and divine messengers, who serve as a link to the celestial world. The house (Ship) or the tent (Revelation) and the chest are motifs that suggest the presence of God. The ark, as a sealable form, provides protection and is associated with the iconographic representation of the ship and the Christian Church, as well as with the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament. In some paintings (Feltámadás [lit. Resurrection]), the chest is present as a coffin or sarcophagus, and its concealing, containing form also becomes a metaphor for death and mystery in Baksai’s small-scale works (Tanúság [lit. Testimony]). Another theme, often depicted in earlier works, is water. Water, as one of the four primordial elements, appears as a spring (Aganippé), as a source of water (Dawn), as rain and as the life-giving medium of fish. He repeatedly uses the translucent opalescent surface of the pause to depict the water. In several of Baksai’s paintings, the fish symbolises Christ. Stone is a recurring motif in many of the paintings, both as a reference to the Christian Church in the form of St. Peter (the Ark) and as a foundation stone, sacred stone (saxum sacrum), as a component of buildings (Chimney, Tower) or as a representation of the Eye of God. One of the fundamental subjects of József Baksai’s art is the question of existence and non-existence, of coming into being and passing away. In his watercolour collages, Teremtés (lit. Creation), Creatio, and the seed-bearing Remény (lit. Hope) can be related to birth. One of the most frequently used figures, the bull (Mennydörgés [lit. Thunder]), a symbol of fertility in Egyptian art, is also associated with this theme as a representation of Rain. The bull can be seen in many images, in many different meanings and shapes, from the zodiacal earth-egg, a symbol of fertility, to the appearance of Zeus as a bull, to the Cretan bull cult and the legend of the Minotaur. The transition between life and death is the gateway that both separates and connects the living and the dead worlds. A frequent figure in Baksai’s paintings is the ancient Egyptian deity Anubis, son of Osiris, who played a major role in the cult of the dead. The constant cycle of life and death is alluded to in Feltámadás (lit. Resurrection), Visszatérés (lit. Return), and the Last Judgement, as well as in eternal life in Nyolc (lit. Eight) and Ítélet (lit. Judgement).
In addition to the themes, the paintings’ worn surfaces also evoke the time so important to Baksai – the “shadows that fall across the land” from the days of the Ancestors. The small watercolours are reminiscent of miniatures painted on parchment or small devotional pictures. They are also tiny windows opening into infinity.
The small pictures in the series are created continuously, like diary entries, to remind us of the passage of time. They follow each other like days, weeks, months, and years. As if they were calendar pages or window slits carved into the wall of time. The series expands year by year, with pieces continually being made, suggesting the continuity of passing time and the recurring elements that mark the cycle. The transparent marks in Baksai’s watercolours symbolise our momentary existence in the ephemeral time, leaving a lasting mark on the fragile paper.
József Baksai recognised that time is not static; it is an eternal, everlasting process, even if our human existence is only a fleeting moment in the history of time. On the space–time–event horizon, art also appears as a coordinate, and with it, a new system is born. That is why it does not try to compete with time. And although, like all artists, his intention is to leave a mark across the ages – to create something lasting – he tries to make time his accomplice, ally, and partner. His art is timely both in its working method and in its topicality. It evokes the geo-historical, historical, cultural, and artistic memories and heritage of the past, primarily through the continuous, fateful workings of time. In all this, time is both his companion and his creative partner. He is a true contemporary, not only with us but with anyone and anything, regardless of time and place, because, in his case, time (no longer) separates but connects.
Baksai's paintings seek to capture the eternal value of the transience of our momentary existence within the endless flow of time. At the same time, they serve as a reminder of the importance of what is believed to be eternal – i.e. timeless – values, in contrast to the momentary and ephemeral.