From the very beginning, Eszter Csurka’s art has been marked by an intention to break away from dominant stylistic trends. Her creative attitude and outlook are characterised by multifaceted, sensitively articulated artistic expressions; she continually re-creates herself. Her works function as diagnoses, reflections on the present. She plays with space and time, the human body, and material. She pursues the traces of vanished space and time – that which, in appearance, once existed and is no more, and yet persists in a different mode of being.
She began her artistic career in a period preceded by the heroic rebellions of the 1970s and the subcultural world of the 1980s, while the 1990s themselves were years of historical turning points. The political transition in Hungary [the 1989–1990 transition from state socialism to democracy] had taken place, censorship was abolished, and both older and younger generations embarked on new paths. Western European and American artistic models became more widely known through the possibility of free travel. Genres mixed; their pluralism became generalised, and new media emerged. As a result, popular culture, advertising, visual art, appropriation, and the techniques and questions of copying became natural components of artistic life, just as interactive installations and video installations did.
Light and shadow, photography and painting
The boundaries between traditional branches of art have long since loosened under the pressure of new media; even painting has absorbed digital elements and their specific visuality. From the outset of her career, Eszter Csurka has combined the imagery of photography and painting, painting into negatives and then enlarging them. Through multi-stage transformations – scanning, printing, and computer manipulation – she created a still-life series based on Polaroid images. In one of her interviews, she summarised her artistic vision and method as follows: “What matters, in my view, is usually the manual part of the image. It is the spatial or temporal displacement of a head, a face, or a body. I observe that through digital technology, and then paint it manually. What becomes digital in my works are the background prints – these various rasters or generated spaces that I print onto an image. But the figures themselves – since the figure conveys emotion to such an extent – are better realised, for me, through this more direct, more immediate way of painting.”
The work produced through the alteration and transformation of an original photographic image is not a copy but a new visual phenomenon, one that carries in space and time the artist’s point of view and the psychological condition of the blurred, shifted figure – the undulation of their emotions.
In her early works as well, light and movement, and the interplay of emotions with chance events in time and space, play an important role, together with their mutual interaction. Her pictures are built on contrasts: on the dissolving relationship of light and shadow. With her spherical forms, she evokes our longing for wholeness, yet the asymmetry of the image unsettles the viewer, dislodging them from an imagined realm of harmony. The bluish, vibrating light and the softened edges intensify our uncertainty: where are we, in what kind of space and time, is it night or day, are we inside or outside?
She wades into the sea and becomes one with it; she covers the exhibition floor with a shore of rice, paraphrasing the mythological meaning of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, one of the emblematic works of the Renaissance (Ernst Museum, Budapest). In Csurka’s work, it is the sea that becomes a woman, the sensuous ideal of womanhood. The sea has no clothes; it is naked. If we look closely at Botticelli’s painting, we see that it captures the moment of arrival – that moment when the goddess of beauty and love, having been born from the sea foam, sets foot on dry land for the first time. With Csurka, the movement is reversed: we wade into the sea. “A tenger, mondtad haldokolva, / s azóta ez az egy szavad / jelenti számomra a tengert, / s azt is talán, hogy te ki vagy. // S azt is talán, ki vagyok én? / Hullámvölgyek, hullámhegyek. / Agóniád, akár a tenger, / megszabadít és eltemet.” (lit. “The sea, you said, dying, / and since then that one word of yours / has meant the sea for me, / and perhaps also who you are. // And perhaps also who I am? / Troughs of waves, crests of waves. / Your agony, like the sea, / delivers and buries me.”) (János Pilinszky, A tenger [The Sea])
She abstracts, yet her human figures remain recognisable. It is as if they were relinquishing their independence, as if they were trying to escape; yet their dynamic gestures and swirling movements – neither here nor there – signal an intermediate emotional and mental state, marked by a longing for autonomy, for walking on their own two feet. Invisible bonds connect the figures: the compulsion to change, and time that has accelerated and become inescapable.
The motif of the sphere recurs in a number of her works. On one such sphere sits a human figure, while behind them, stand two intertwined forms, rendered in the recognisably ‘Csurka’ colour palette. It is as though a tornado had seized the figures; they spin and turn in upon their own spirals. Then the artist forces us to pause – she counterpoints the movement and the whirlwind with great delicacy. Pain and fear pulse through the image, a sense of something irreversible. From an almost empty gesture, from a single movement, she extracts the underlying psychological events, while repeatedly returning her figure to the world of those original gestures. Many worlds are created. Mirrors and splinters. Even from her images of solitude, a certain warmth emanates.
The dream-play, the dream-forms and dream-movements, the undefined and at times oppressive representations of space and time (the search for boundaries) are all intended to communicate to us, the viewers, the inner vibrations of the soul. There is no “good” or “bad” figure, no correct or incorrect movement. We hurtle along as if on a ghost train, but instead of the perfectly retouched bodies of celebrities, we are confronted with our own most secret interior selves and their distortions. Our modern world is grounded in film, in the media, in the moving image. The written surface loses its importance. In this swirling, uncertain world, we must stand our ground and recognise our own frailty and vulnerability. For the gaze of others can at once unsettle us. The other’s gaze is a creative gaze.
Her breakthrough into the art world – into the artistic canon – can be dated to 2007. By then, Eszter Csurka was no longer concerned solely with the world of light and colour. Through her watercolour series based on the movements of a swimming female figure and her canvases depicting men in motion within indeterminate spaces, she confronts viewers with existential questions (tradition and transience, temporality, the transcendent). The motif of swimming returns emphatically in later works, particularly in the underwater sculptures she creates.
The aura of body and soul
The following words offer a glimpse into Eszter Csurka’s creative universe: “I never give titles, no. I think there is a kind of energy field, or domain of interpretation, and what I love most is listening to people at openings talking about what they see in the picture. …And I also think these artworks are capsules. Time capsules, but emotional capsules as well, into which – just like with the DNA chain we mentioned – I compress, as far as I can, that momentary feeling, or rather cluster of feelings, a kind of wave-motion that was present when I made the picture.”
She paints her figures as though we could see through them, sensing their states of consciousness. The body becomes bodiless, becomes soul, becomes spirit-form. It is not the physical laws of movement that the artist reconfigures, but the human psyche – the way we respond to ourselves and to what happens in the world. The body moves in a space that is not real, even if it appears to be. It is the mode of painting that generates this appearance: an expressive use of colour with a powerful intensity.
In the early 2000s, her photographic figures – stiffened into strange postures and positions, mostly faceless – appeared as an exciting experiment. This is a search for thresholds, working with cropping and omission. Her point of departure is her own photograph, which she manipulates and refines on the computer. She abolishes the idea of a direct correspondence between perception and its object. A sensation of light can be produced not only by light: a blow can do the same. We see sparks, electromagnetic phenomena. Sensations can be exchanged. How can we know what is real? The artist discovers new forms of reality. In these images, we hear colours and see sounds. Her figures are in motion; it is their fate to live through their emotional storms and whirlwinds. They communicate. We see a play between closeness and physical distance. She expands the personal zone: wherever she places a figure within a given space, it claims more room than its outline would suggest.
Around her figures, the artist draws an invisible shell. A womb? An aura? The soft, dissolving folds seem to envelop them; they float, lacking a precise location, possessing only constantly changing and indefinable positions. Perception in these images reaches a level that is not available to us in everyday experience. As Goethe remarked, “What is the hardest thing of all? The thing that seems the easiest to you: to see with your eyes what lies before your eyes.”
In the images, we witness a process of becoming – shaping into a particular personality. They have not yet fallen apart, even if they must choose, even if they stand before a choice or have been forced into one. In their movements, we sense the signs of inner division: opposing forces, the turmoil of instinct and imagination strain their bodies and their movements.
Body and nature
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see”, – as Edgar Degas once formulated it. In Eszter Csurka’s works, depth and surface are brought together in such a way that the world accessible to the senses reveals another face: the world beyond experience, the sensual world. We perceive an in-between space, the moments that lie between moments – time and space leaning into one another, the state of transition. As Csurka herself puts it: “This transitional space, this time that lies between two moments – this is what I would like to make visible through my work. Light, which is both wave and particle at once, whose perception depends on the observer, is a very important constituent of every visual experience. Negative light, the dark shadow that turns into brightness – this ever-undulating energy – that is what I want to make visible in the language of painting.”
Eszter Csurka places the change and renewal of life and nature at the centre of her work. What moves the world in these pictures and objects? Energy – which never ceases to exist but merely transforms. Her creations possess musical qualities, rhythm and melody, as though they could be heard. For her, “the meaning of our time” is not a trite statement, but the recognition and avowal that time, place, and space have been available to her. She is not conducting a spectrum analysis, nor is she trying to determine the position of a distant celestial body. Her gaze is closer: she focuses on the phenomena of the terrestrial world, on the forms, emphases, and movements (the dance) of the human body. She is an artist of the body. She seeks the sanctity of movement.
Throughout, Eszter Csurka remains faithful to a modernist, human-centred perspective, yet, with her sculptures, she opens towards the representation of nature and the non-human. She reflects on how technology, the global economy, ecology, and their interconnected systems alter the human body, the human psyche, and our relationship to matter. She makes us aware that we are participants in, creators and employees of, and sufferers within this system. The central component, the alpha and omega of her oeuvre, can be described through the concept of new materiality or neo-materiality, whether we are speaking of her ink drawings, paintings, or the sculptures she creates underwater.
She also creates – indeed, generates – works in water, forming objects that are formless and yet moulded. These sculptures resemble neither Kronos nor the Minotaur nor the Hydra nor any sea monster nor Neptune. With their twisted, hollow, vulnerable shapes (like the skeletons of shells, corals, sponges, or plants), they evoke the dawn of time, the world of extinct prehistoric creatures, and also call to mind the cornucopia of the goddess Fortuna. Primaeval shapelessness becomes a kind of silent speech, communicating through cyphers, radiating mystery. Such sculptures jolt the viewer out of everyday experience; they bear the sacredness of creation, the soul, spirituality, and sensuality of the creative human being. No hands, no feet, no heads are visible – only protruding forms straining upwards, towards the sky. We perceive the miracle of matter and gesture (of the artist’s hand), together with the question of how the laws of physics operate or how they are suspended. It is as though her works born in the underwater world were paraphrasing Albert Camus’ famous sentence: “I marry the sea.”
The metaphysics of movement and creation
As the poet Lőrinc Szabó wrote in his last poem: “Bár meg se moccan, rohan minden út./ Kúszik rólunk is a fekete kúp.” (lit. “Though it never moves, all roads are rushing. / The black cone is crawling off us.”) In Eszter Csurka’s work, too, everything is in flight, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, seemingly without purpose. There is no static state in her images. The male torso opens, becomes light under pressure; we see a moving skeleton, flesh peeling away from it – it becomes thought, a boned-out reality. The works are also images of woundedness, persecution, and being hunted down. They depict agitation and the ceaseless change of life. We struggle to grasp what has happened and what is happening. This desire at once lifts the viewer out of time and immerses them in presence – in the perpetual present of change, in its moments, which our minds can perceive, yet are unable to analyse, examine, or narrate in any reassuring manner.
The gestures and movements are revealing, for the figures cannot forget or conceal what has happened to them – in their consciousness and in the external world. We witness a process of becoming a distinct personality. They have not yet disintegrated, even if they must choose, even if they stand before a decision or have been driven to one. In their movements, we sense the signs of inner division: opposing forces, the turmoil of instinct and imagination strain their bodies and their bodily motion.
Our proposition is paradoxical: in Csurka’s work, movement is at the same time an expression of lack. Movement compensates for something missing; it is a reward, a treat. It is as if the bodies on these canvases did not know what they desired or on what they depended. They are free – at last they can do what they wish – they believe there is no control. There is none; they become spirit-forms, sliding into one another, passing through each other. They possess no dominion over the other, nor over themselves. They struggle simply to exist; we see the battle between body and soul, the question of whether they are willing to change.
Experiments and visual paradigms
Videos
She shapes matter under water, with ease yet with strict discipline, always mindful of the possibilities and rules of formation. She dives down, submerges herself, and shapes from within that element. The human soul cannot be moulded in such a manner, yet what becomes fixed within – in the depths of the human psyche – depends on time, fate, the events of our lives, the world we see and experience. Whether we recognise the possibilities and rules that concern us is a question that already leads beyond the world touched by the exhibition.
Installations
A body clad in a carpet-like layer of ash signals the existence of a dark force that chains human beings to the insidious time of passing away; and in vain, the counterpoint – the shimmering of an aluminium-coloured body – time flows between these two extremes. It is this time, with its many masks, that the artist reveals (Ybl Buda Creative House, Budapest). It is as though someone had walked through fire here and only these traces remained – and yet they are not motionless either, but continue to decay, perhaps eventually to crumble into dust, to be scattered in the air by currents of wind, a thousandfold; they, too, will possess – indeed already possess – a spectral after-image. The white, glistening material covered in aluminium foil startles us like an ice sheet or polar topography. These forms are not immobile either: snow and ice accumulate and will melt, becoming water, which is also, in itself, pure movement. Nature’s cycle underpins both installations.
Performances
According to Eszter Csurka: “Performance is a communal act: the work only acquires its meaning through the presence of those who receive it. …I present models; above all, I want to draw attention to the uniqueness and unrepeatability of existence, for which I find performance a particularly suitable medium, since it too is unique and unrepeatable.”
In 2003, at Várfok Gallery, she created life-size bread sculptures; what interested her was “the freedom of the dough”, the result of the process. Art, like bread, can be consumed and digested. The symbolic message of the action is that, by contrast, consumer society digests art with difficulty. For this reason, the artist must develop new strategies and languages to make herself intelligible.
The paradoxes of memory, or the limits of self-understanding
In her works, the concepts of soul and body, knowledge and unknowing, remembering and forgetting intertwine, without her articulating or expressing any overtly ideological standpoint. The world of myth and the absurdity of existence both appear in her art. Myths are characterised by their existence beyond time and space. Eszter Csurka’s places and figures lack concreteness; they appear timeless. Their presence in the here and now is granted by their absurdity – a quality that most strongly characterises our own age and everyday life. The inner tension of the works lies in the encounter of eternal presence and absurd existence. As Csurka observes: “The digital effects or background prints are like the watermark in money. They’re excellent as tools for dating a given period.”
The body and corporeality in her work do not speak primarily of Eros, but of the lack of perfection, of the reality of life. It is with this that she saturates the mysterious subject that appears and half-emerges in her images – a subject whose existence either guarantees or denies the reality of lack. Her pictures are also cries, openings into a mute world. In her words: “Painting is a quiet and very lonely genre. …I once put it like this: it is an activity like writing a poem into the river with sake. With the difference that this does leave a trace behind.”
Her art – the uncovering and uniquely shaped articulation of the contradictions of time and movement – is itself a form of revolt, yet a dignified one, reaching beyond the self, because she creates with stubborn consistency, fashioning her own patterns. Through the unpredictability of movement, she signals that, even in this mechanised world, chance, surprise, and the multitude of human gestures remain present. Something always slips, fails to fit within the accustomed order. It is precisely this slipping – the first step and the next, the repetition – that gives her works their charm, lightness, and drama, together with an unresolved question: should we attend to ourselves and to others or not; are we sufficiently motivated, energetic, and persistent, or do we renounce change, convinced that it will not succeed, even as we long to free ourselves from our constraints without consequences?
Where is the boundary between memory and imagination, between movement and body? – We may ask when viewing her works. In all the genres she practises, she seeks and affirms the continuity of human existence, as though she wished to pursue memory to its end – she remembers ceaselessly. Lived experience and fantasy slide into one another; we are confronted with the paradoxes of remembering and forgetting and thus with the nature of ourselves and our identity, with the question of who it is who acts within and through us. This is nothing other than self-understanding and self-care. The essence of her work is not to be sought in what is produced during the process of creation, but in the act of creation itself, insofar as that act is the manifestation and expression of the artist’s self-identity.