If someone were entirely unfamiliar with the art of the past three and a half decades, and were to read only the professional biography and list of achievements of the painter Márton Barabás, they could already conclude – simply from the exhibition titles alone (Klavierskulpturen, Bécsi Mechanika – Talált és kitalált zongorák [Viennese Mechanics – Found and Invented Pianos], Zongoraátiratok [Piano Transcriptions], Hangképek [Sound Images], Preparált zongorák [Prepared Pianos]) – that music, and more specifically a single instrument, the piano, occupies a central place in the artist’s oeuvre. This assumption is borne out by the long series of works themselves and was also explicitly confirmed by the artist in a conversation recorded in 2001:
“I studied piano; I kept colliding with this instrument again and again. It’s interesting – once, when we were in Kaposvár to see a theatre performance, I found a discarded instrument there. It wasn’t even a piano, but a harmonium. At that time, nothing had yet taken shape in me about doing anything with the instrument’s mechanics – that only came together later. I suppose it was for the same reason Arman tore the violin apart. I did the same with the piano. Music has always fascinated me. The piano is an extremely abstract object, an expressive tool of fantastic power: two or three keys can evoke the entire instrument, which also embodies one of the peaks of human tool-making. And think of the musicality intoned by the keys, the peculiar rhythm, the contrasts – and pay attention to the material of the instrument itself, the ivory, the ebony. The piano also allows the creation of multiple voices across the picture surface. One of these voices was created through the image of the keyboard sequence. Recently, I have abandoned this and instead paint imagined sculptures onto my pictures. The key appears alongside these motifs only as something strung along a curve or as a turning form. I feel that contemporary music influenced me just as strongly as hyperrealism or conceptual art. Above all, repetitive music – the music of Steve Reich and Meredith Monk – fascinated me; I wanted to do something similar in the visual arts.”
(In this conversation, first published in the journal Új Forrás and later in the small volume Keretek, which brought together ten interviews, the artist also addressed the much-misunderstood 1979 ‘piano-burning action’ that took place at the open-air exhibition of the University of Horticulture in Budapest. This event was later branded by official cultural policy as a scandalous and outrageous episode in Hungary’s artistic life, even though during the action the artist ‘merely’ evoked the spirit of Endre Ady by igniting leaf litter placed inside the piano: “égtek lelkemben kis rőzse dalok” – [lit. “little faggot-songs burned in my soul.”])
In the introduction, we referred to Márton Barabás as a painter – a designation that now requires modification. Although he graduated from the academy as a painter, appeared at his first exhibitions with easel paintings, and even today important ensembles of paintings emerge in his studio during specific creative periods, in other phases he produces drawings, at different times small-scale oil-on-canvas compositions executed with traditional means, or artists’ books. Throughout his now four-decade-long career, he has consistently been drawn to space itself and to the possibility of creating compositions that step out of the plane. Or perhaps Márton Barabás’s creative attitude can be defined more precisely if, alongside traditional modes of artistic creation, we detect at the deeper level of his artistic motivation a search independent of branches and genres, of media and categories – an emphatic intent to experiment and explore unknown artistic and creative territories. This may explain why, even in the peculiar order of Márton Barabás’s panel paintings, one can clearly trace a system of image construction that departs from convention and a method of creating spatial illusion that breaks free of established norms. In the mid-1990s, the artist wrote in one of his catalogues: “Lately I have been attempting to present object groups in the plane. The sculptures are the actors in my pictures. Around them, and often through them, illusion grows – an invented pictorial depth, an imagined space. The arbitrariness of image construction is an experience for me.”
Works created in the fields of painting and sculpture, at the boundary between them – the panel paintings permeated by plastic illusionism, as well as the painterly reliefs and sculptural objects – all testify that one of the central questions of Márton Barabás’s artistic practice is the exploration of space and the interpretation of the dilemmas of plane and volume. Under the spell of this investigative spirit, exemplary instances of the rejection of plastic regularities and sculptural conventions emerged: painted spatial elements made of wood and fibreboard, particularly in the 1980s, evoking acanthus leaves, snail and wolf’s-tooth motifs; and the piano-part constructions – the “found and invented pianos” – which have accompanied his creative work from the very beginning to the present day. In the piano-part spatial constructions and reliefs, and in the box works, the artist employs every component of the instrument – from the rollers mounted on the legs, through the pedals and keyboard, the music stand and lid, to the strings and sound-producing hammers, even the small felt dampers – to construct exceptionally witty works that synthesise plastic form and musicality, or the idea of musicality, with remarkable sensitivity. These compositions, placed freely in space, mounted on the wall as reliefs, or fitted into box-like structures in an almost bas-relief manner, are typically organised around motifs of circles and spirals, systems of repeating lamellae, rearing tendrils and interlocking claws. Through occasional combinations with other objects – for example, ping-pong balls – they present themselves as exciting compositions that play on fragility and delicacy.
Alongside the piano-part spatial constructions and sculptures, a third group of the artist’s sculptural works is organised around ribbon-like plastics formed from strangely bending, elongated wooden extensions that sometimes loop back on themselves like Möbius strips. With their capricious trajectories and enigmatically space-enmeshing presence, these seem like lines stepping out of the plane into space, creating their own laws, nervously vibrating and transforming the environments they occupy. Márton Barabás’s compositions, which consciously reject the classical sculptural rules of mass formation and mass creation, reconnect with tradition in terms of spatial conception – but in a way that radically renews it. These works strive for the most intense possible appropriation of spatial dimensions, for the intensive permeation of space, for the creation of an identity and a tense unity between work and space, distinct in quality yet inseparable. The spatial line created by Márton Barabás is an autonomous new reality – nothing other than itself, irreplaceable, approachable from any direction, viewable from any vantage point, with every aspect a principal view. It is a work of art that induces and virtually accentuates the dynamic forces of space. The spatial line drawn by the artist is itself a touch of freedom: a dynamic, plastic object elevated into the sphere of ethereal abstraction, which concentrates both the magnificence of freedom and the absurdity of its limits.
Alongside these spatial works, in the world of painted illusionism, of “object groups presented in the plane,” Márton Barabás creates images that display constructive elements imbued with a sense of organicity – interlinked or independently emerging regular and irregular geometric elements and bodies. Cool objectivity struggles with a transcendent, visionary quality in these oil-on-canvas and oil-on-panel works, interpreted through rich colour, permeated by vigorous virtual movements, flows, and a sense of suspension. Yet, as if by magic, almost imperceptibly, the mysterious painterly whirl of closed structures and forms framed by hard contours – keyboard sequences, object fragments – softens into decorative harmony.
[2016]