With a supportive but non-professional family background, after graduating from the secondary school of the Franciscan Order in Szentendre, he studied the craft of goldsmithing, and in 1985 he was admitted to the Hungarian College of Fine Arts (now: Hungarian University of Fine Arts) to major in printmaking. During his secondary school years he was more drawn to literature, but he also took many photographs and spent time at the independent art school [a workshop-based art school where students learn directly from practicing artists] in Zebegény. He received his basic drawing training in József Szentgyörgyi’s study group. In the somewhat more open atmosphere of the 1980s, the books he read and the films he watched gave the public discourse of the era a double meaning.
At the college, he worked in a strong, inspiring studio environment (Faa Balázs, Koronczi Endre), while he was also significantly influenced by the artistic circles of Esztergom and Szentendre. During these years, he produced study drawings marked by a strong sense of form, as well as expressive lithographs exploring the possibilities of visual expression. After graduating from the Academy, he set these early works aside – only in recent times have some of them been shown to the public, following the recognition of their merit.
The start of his career coincided with the change of regime, the rethinking of the artistic field, and the changing conditions for visibility and making a living. The generation starting out at the same time as he did brought an essentially new voice. As Ágnes Berecz writes: “The very fact that the conceptual framework still in use – and more or less functional – in the 1980s can no longer be applied today tells us far more about art practices in the 1990s than any attempt to search along the lines of post–post-concept, another round of neo-expressionism, yet another ‘new painting’, the neo-hyperreal, the neo-neo-Dada and neo-neo-pop, or the perfectly meaningless object art.” This movement – uncertain in name and most often referred to simply as 'contemporary art' – was characterised by its connection to the mainstream and its interest in media. In any case, these artists stepped beyond the earlier formal constraints and boundaries, and as a result, the genre of graphic art slipped into insignificance.
Lajos Csontó was not among the key figures of the emerging generation; at first, as a 'productive artist', he mainly undertook applied graphic and photographic work – making early and highly proficient use of digital tools. He married young, had two sons, and built a home for his family in Visegrád.
During the 1990s, he appeared in smaller exhibitions in Hungary and abroad as a graphic artist and photographer – mostly alongside his former classmates from college and members of the Young Photographers’ Studio led by András Balla. Yet his works became increasingly difficult to place within the prevailing frameworks of graphic art or photography at the time – and they did not fit comfortably into the heavily politicised contemporary art scene either. He was driven by the possibilities of photo-based expression: the relationship between noticing and experiencing, and between recording and shaping.
In the late 1990s, the works he exhibited were already confidently formed, unmistakable, and rooted in a distinctive conceptual terrain. Through texts handled with deliberate typography and the layering of characteristic photo-based visual elements, he examined fundamental issues of recognition, naming, remembering and the formation of thought – concerns that extend beyond the field of visual art (És mégis, és mégsem [And Yet, and Yet Not], 1997; Istenem [My God], 1998; Hűséges eső [Loyal rain], 1999). While the preceding neo-avant-garde generation often found correlations with the new scientific worldview and cosmology, Csontó was inspired by interpretive practices rooted in semiotics and hermeneutics. He also approached communication in the way Walter J. Ong articulated it: “According to the ‘medium model’, the message travels from the sender to the receiver. In genuine human communication, it is not enough for the sender to be a sender: he must also assume the role of receiver before any message can be sent at all”.
Following his exhibition Mindent értek, apa (I understand everything, dad) at the Vintage Gallery in Budapest (1999), critics began to pay closer attention to the distinctive qualities of his work, although earlier writings had also been supportive. After Mindent értek, apa, studies primarily addressed the particular relationship between image and text in his practice – albeit with a certain degree of hesitation, as it was difficult to reconcile the everyday nature of the chatty visual elements Csontó employed with the intellectual density of the works, and to navigate the duality of latent personalisation and the offered modes of identification.
It appears that after his formative years, Lajos Csontó developed a studio practice that, in a certain sense, operated in the manner of Baroque emblematic art: the images served as manifestations of abstract content, while the accompanying words created a distance from the images themselves. This distance had to be traversed, and it was bridged by interwoven commentaries that offered a space for the arguments of moral meditation. The trap lay in the fact that both the images and the texts were infinitely fragile and everyday in nature, so the interpretive process prompted by the work remained open, almost without points of reference. This enigmatic practice was analysed perceptively by György Várkonyi: “In Csontó’s work, the inscription – the text assigned to the image – does not resolve the riddle, but creates it. … The most useful analogy seems to be the subtitled sound film, where the image runs and a changing text runs alongside it. … The two pieces of information, the visual and the verbal, are not synchronised in Csontó’s case. The discrepancy is not temporal; it is as if, by mistake, the dialogue of another film had been inserted into the reel. A peculiar montage: a found image paired with a text that, in its apparent casualness and genuine banality, also seems found. … The suspicion is justified that this forced choice, packaged within formal-logical alternatives, opens up ethical dimensions. The opposing statements do not merely form the ornamental reciprocal patterns of words.”
He then presented an important work – later frequently cited – at the Kunsthalle Budapest’s large survey exhibition Klíma (Climate) (curator: Zsolt Petrányi). His photographic series of his contemporaries formed the following sentence: “You Became the Victim of an Illusion.” The meticulously executed photographs, and the force they carried, resonated both with viewers and with the art world. As János Sturcz interpreted it: “The very first and simplest fact is that the participants’ bodies became part of the illusion that constitutes the artwork – and this, of course, also applies to the viewer. The second, more general meaning is that those who put themselves on display, as a community, became victims of the illusion. The nature of this illusion becomes clear when we consider who belongs to this group. Csontó’s work depicts representative artists and critics of the middle generation who, despite having notable professional achievements and at times even international reputations, live in circumstances in Hungary that are far from proportional to this, both in terms of livelihood and social recognition. Thus, these artists became victims of an illusion in their lives and aspirations when, upon entering their careers, they imagined that they could attain the recognition and livelihood appropriate to their work, and that they would be judged on the basis of their achievements. In this sense, the young creators are themselves the deceived participants of the small-scale, inward-looking Hungarian art world.” Since this statement appeared within the context of an art exhibition, its local relevance could be delineated in this way. Yet it is likely that many viewers interpreted it instead as a wry declaration from the artists themselves – one projected onto the everyday realities that surrounded them.
These works could have offered Csontó the possibility to establish his position within that field in which most artists defined their place through a characteristic constellation of themes, problems and expressive devices. One could easily have said: he is the artist who overlays his photographs with words and sentences. But he considered this repetitive behaviour strange: “I generally have a compulsive aversion to showing a work more than once. Of course, I know this is my own perspective, because I am always pleased when a new piece can come into being, since my works are usually created for exhibitions on the basis of existing sketches and plans, rather than as the result of consistent studio practice.”
The works of the following years can be considered ‘monochrome’ neither in their questions nor in their means. Just as in autogenic training – which he personally needed as his life circumstances changed –, the experience becomes conscious, he recognised that contemplation itself is an action. In the process of life experiences and observations, opportunities to exhibit and invitations become points of concentration. Among these appearances there are occasional adventures, yet most of them are interconnected by an increasingly understanding attitude that links the artist to his own works. After the uncertain, perpetual space of his earlier pieces, the stakes grew higher: the experience now carries a distinctly existential weight. At the same time, it is also hidden, modest: we only sense the personal story, the ego narrative – and so we can effortlessly layer it with our own stories. As Csontó puts it: “I think that the personal stories we live through as individuals are very close to one another; we all face roughly similar problems, solutions or unresolved matters throughout our lives.”
For the exhibition Reflexinger (Kunsthalle, 2003) he submitted a video piece – the barely changing, massively projected faces were accompanied by a curious pair of sentences: “I carry my gullibility forever. I guard my gullibility forever.” HIMNUSZ/Anthem (2004): “We see the events from the viewpoint of a swimmer; while listening to the sound of the Hungarian national anthem, we read its concepts in French, then during the next ‘length’ we hear the French anthem while reading its stripped-down content and list of concepts in Hungarian.” On a superficial reading, it makes destructive nationalisms explicit. But as we continue watching the looped video – first made in Bulgarian, then in many other languages – we increasingly surrender to the swimmer’s determination: bringing the palms together, stroke after stroke, staying on the surface for as long as possible. The installation Ne félj (Don’t be afraid, 2006), realised in several forms, is another powerful, emblematic articulation of determination and endurance. Without denying its personal motivation, this work strives more than any earlier one to address the viewer directly. In front of a large sheet of repellent, foil-like material, a dissolving and re-forming inscription writes itself/evaporates before our eyes on two screens: “There is still time. There is no more time.” The most accurate summary of this period was formulated by a fellow artist attentive to Csontó’s work, Erika Baglyas: “He does not ask questions. He places the significance of things that simply exist on a precariously balanced set of scales.”
Although everything around Csontó changed – he moved to Pilisborosjenő and began teaching in Eger – his working conditions remained just as difficult as before. He still has no studio, for instance. Even so, he insists on manual precision and craftsmanship in every single piece he creates – whether he employs technically complex media effects or combines materials not usually brought together. Gaining an exact understanding of each material and technique, and ensuring that even short-lived materials achieve a degree of durability, is a fundamental requirement for him.
A large-scale survey exhibition of his installation works was Leesett szavak (Fallen Words) (Miskolc Gallery, 2010). The clichéd yet weighty words (light, memory, answer, loyalty…) could form sentences within the enclosed space (covered in black foil), as if inside our own minds. At the same time, their physical form (red-painted plaster casts) is lifted up and then literally shattered into pieces. Heavy/ephemeral material for heavy/ephemeral words. Physical actions – lifting and dropping the words, walking through the space –, documentation (the process of fragmentation exists in photographs) and contemplation (on the personal weight of the words) operate together, each in its own time and rhythm, yet condensing into a single idea. “Does a connection exist between the everyday and the metaphysical? And if it does, can it be found?” – asks Erzsébet Tatai in relation to his works from these years.
Alongside the solo exhibitions that marked turning points, smaller works were continuously produced like those poems in retrospective poetry volumes that never make it into anthologies, yet still have their place within the structure of the book – momentary condensations of a day, an impression, an idea, an insight. They are neither points of departure nor peaks, but moments of existence. Nor are they diaries – if we imagine ego-narrative as a chain of events and turning points. A tiny found object, turned over in the hand for a while, then photographed together with a situation: either in harmony or as a counterpoint. Worn surfaces, photographs from a flea market, strange strings of letters…
A significant turning point in his career path was the Paris scholarship – a longer stay in the hive-like Cité internationale des arts, between the Île Saint-Louis and the winding streets of the Marais. Museum visits and orientation are, of course, important – although in Paris the traces of contemporary art are surprisingly hard to find. What is truly formative: the fresh sights, the different human constellations, the masses of colours arranged in unfamiliar ways. Csontó shoots continuously, then later, after organising the fourteen thousand images on a digital drive, he is taken aback. What can one possibly do with so many photographs? And with ‘good’ photographs at that, for it is no effort for him to render the endless variety of experience into a precisely composed image.
Alongside his earlier media-related experiences, and alongside the differences and specific interactions between textual and visual communication, a new challenge has emerged: the characteristics of the spatial and temporal extension of images. In earlier periods of image history, the pictorial dimension often approached the depicted. Yet even the photographic negative – whether glass plate, roll film or Leica format – possessed a given material extent. The digital file that carries the image, by contrast, has an intangible existence, while – thanks to advances in technology – the high-quality image-objects that can be generated from it are becoming ever larger. Csontó summarises these experiences in two important exhibitions. One is Válogatás (Selection) (Raiffeisen Gallery, Budapest, 2009), whose title is already quite suggestive: at first sight, the paired images seem accidental, yet they form tiny formal and thematic connections, playful little rhymes between pictures – cognitive stereo-photographs. On the other hand, Közös Nevező (Common Grounds) (Dorottya Street Gallery, Budapest, 2008) sets off in a very different direction: in these seemingly randomly chosen, richly detailed, large-format photographs transformed into artworks, Csontó expands the field of contingency through barely perceptible interventions – a shadow here, a single word there – making them noticeable and worth contemplating. A third conceptual experiment, markedly different from the previous two, was first realised at the 2005 Gyergyószárhegy artists’ retreat. Into the centre of innocent landscapes and detailed photographs he later inserts the word ‘history’. Sometimes a mountain ridge, sometimes even a puddle, a sense of distance or closeness, can awaken in us a feeling of belonging – an interpretive route that only those born to it can truly follow, for whom this landscape is a cultural fabric rather than a map. Csontó described his artistic practice of intuition–formulation–exercise in his inaugural lecture as follows: “In my experience, the lived events of existence, as well as the social structures that influence our mental environment – and above all their constant changes – generate an inner image within us. This inner image can be approached in a causal, descriptive and interpretative manner. Conversely, one may also live with a fluid, continuously shifting, river-like inner image that can only be observed rather than analysed. As an artist, it is difficult to describe ever-changing points; instead, the patterns created by their movements provide some assistance – not so much for interpretation as for lived experience.”
In 2014, Csontó Lajos expanded his earlier works – which had been built on textual–visual dichotomies – with an installation based on a striking spatial duality, created in a busy commercial environment, the MOM Park in Buda. According to the description of the artwork, “the black cloth hanging in mid-air appears to the viewer as a strange question mark, whose mere presence – its act of concealing – also promises a revelation of something hidden. It is a threshold made to be crossed. To discover the secret the cloth hides, we must step into the aura of the piece – we must come to a halt in the shopping centre’s space, which is fundamentally designed for movement and constant flow. By pausing and lifting our gaze, we can move on. And beneath the cloth, we find ourselves transported to a new place that seems far away.” That place is a dark enclosure where only an artificial starry sky glows, spelling out the words “The last chance”. The text is both enigmatic and explicit – and in any case extraordinarily powerful.
Perhaps not intentionally, but this summary suggests change. Over the following years, Csontó’s relationship with his own work changes significantly: he feels less and less need for over-intellectualisation, and gradually lets go of his professional anxieties – while the events of his personal journey become all the heavier. And it is in these same years that the commentators of his work also begin to include summarising reflections on Csontó in their writings.
Áron Fenyvesi positions the artist within the already established generation: “For me at least, Lajos Csontó embodies the archetype of the Hungarian mid-generation contemporary artist whose works can only be described by the category – at first hearing somewhat contradictory, yet on second thought remarkably apt and still valid – of so-called ‘sensual conceptualism’, a term associated with Gábor Andrási.” (That is, insofar as this rather forced label of conceptualism can be applied at all to Csontó’s works, which are conceived so firmly in material terms.)
Szilvia Csanádi highlights the shared professional and conceptual traits of his work: “Lajos Csontó’s methods can be understood as a consistent body of research, in which the use of images at their informational value, the digital shift in cultural life, and the problems of exposure to technological apparatus come to the fore.”
Edit András, meanwhile, considers the underlying mentality important to articulate: “He engages in a kind of self-therapy made visible, in which everything is brought to the surface – from the dynamics of the art world to his relationship with religion, to loves and break-ups.”
The key moment of the following years is the exhibition Felülírás (Overwriting) held at the Bartók 32 Gallery in Budapest (2019). The working process becomes technically more complex, yet conceptually more streamlined: there are no allusions, no cross-references – from the images drifting up from his archive, two somehow form a new relation, and so the artist places them on top of each other, illuminating the pair together. There are no hints, no echoes; the narrative addresses the nature of remembering with precision. Photography is not the preservation of something that happened, not a mirror, not the starting point of memory, but an autonomous entity that – unlike earlier processes – modulates the practice of remembering in its own way. As the physician and psychologist Théodule Ribot observed more than a century ago: “Analogies were sought in inanimate nature, especially in the property of light vibrations to be preserved on a sheet of paper and to remain, in the state of mere vibrations, for a shorter or longer period, ready to reappear under the action of a developing agent. Facts such as these bear only slight resemblance to memory. True, they contain the first condition of all memory: preservation, but the analogy ends there, because here reproduction is so passive, so dependent on the interposition of a foreign substance, that it does not even resemble memory. What we are dealing with are the laws of life, not the laws of nature; the foundations of memory must be sought in the properties of organic matter and nowhere else.” Csontó likewise does not treat the images accumulated in his negative archive as memories: following the path of associative thinking, he connects, modifies, adjusts focus, emphasises – until the image that appears on screen or paper, on that foreign material, at least seems familiar. In this work, however, he no longer generalises and is no longer reserved: instead of analogy or intuition, he articulates directly, accepting the risk of openness.
So he organised this exhibition in 2019 – and what followed were truly the years of risk. Surrounded by a global pandemic, he also had to face an operation shadowed by the very real uncertainty of survival.
In 2022, he underwent a serious, long-planned heart operation: he had time to prepare himself for the possibility of leaving without any certainty of return. During this period he took photographs of himself with his phone and noted down his self-observations and prayers with the concision of poetry. After returning and regaining strength, he arranged the images and texts into a diary-like book, applying a degree of stylisation. It was a particular state of mind: even in the grinding tension of hope, holding fast to what constitutes his way of expression – indeed, his profession – choosing images and words to grasp his experience. “To cross a boundary more than once whose very existence you had never known. […] And in the end you remain where you were, trembling with grace.” “The fear of death became like alcohol. A recurring intoxication.”
Every diary is written for someone else: even if not intended for the wider public, at least for one’s descendants – or even for a future version of oneself. Every diary attempts to take shape as a novel of development, driven by the hope that all of this has meaning, that with the passing of time we ultimately become something. It is in this sense that Kutyaév (Rough Year) can be understood as a diary: its austere texts and images do not seek to go beyond what has happened, and are not allegories. In this work, Lajos Csontó speaks without restraint or didacticism – and this is new not only within his oeuvre, but within the contemporary art world’s present (and abandoned) condition as well.
For an artist still creating, the presentation of a life’s path must therefore stop here – in the middle of a sentence.
[2024]