Man, woman, man, mummy, positive, negative, standing, lying, black, red, mountain, caterpillar, rocket, programmed, presence, absence, grid, hiding place, ancestral mother, trellis, house, cave, coffin, penetration, floating, space, stillness, organic, impersonal, faceless, everyone, alone - and human couple, Adam-Eve, humanity, companions, love, lovemaking, procreation, together, cuddled, terror, fear, vulnerable, humiliated, positive-negative, light-shadow, opposition, unity, security, whole, connection, denial, overture, beginning, end, beginning, end, beginning, end, beginning, end.
This sequence of concepts, divided into two groups according to the associations evoked by the solitary and the paired puppet, was compiled by Pál Deim in 1978 – as quoted by Marianna Kolozsváry in her 1992 book on Deim – referring to the puppet motif which, after the brief period of traditional and unconventional nature-based works in the early 1960s, emerged as the central, characteristic motif of his art. For more than four decades it has remained an indispensable image-forming and form-creating element of his oeuvre. This extended enumeration can also serve as an art-historical interpretive aid to the fundamentally concept-driven world of Deim’s art, while at the same time constituting a peculiar art-psychological formula: from the puppet, and from the interpretive meanings attached to it by the artist, the thematic concerns, intellectual problem clusters, and condensations that preoccupied him can be traced back. “This figure, or its shadow, imprint, appears in every painting and in every medium, from monastery wall to outer space, and creates the unparalleled, long-lasting, and compelling cohesion of Deim’s art,” summarized art historian Ildikó Nagy with lexical concision, drawing the conclusion that “The tension generated between the figure and space, between organic form and instinctive shaping, is transposed into the relationship of the finite and the infinite, of man and the world.”
The oeuvre of painter Pál Deim now spans more than five decades, tracing an arc of Central European and Hungarian history, of lived reality and of modern Hungarian art. Writing about the artist, about his artistic attitude, about that artistic reality sublimated into works, and about his embeddedness in post-1945 Hungarian modernism, the art historian Lajos Németh observed at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s: “Pál Deim is a highly gifted representative of the newest wing of the Szentendre school. He was inspired simultaneously by the art of Barcsay and Vajda, yet went beyond mere imitation. His series created in Serbia is a worthy continuation of the myth-inspired wing of the Szentendre school, while his splendid series of autolithographs, with their extraordinarily precise formal order, carries the promising possibilities of a new monumental, decorative mural art.”
In a more recent synthesis of 20th-century Hungarian art history, published around the turn of the millennium, art historian Gábor Pataki noted that “The lessons to be drawn from Barcsay’s structural method of picture construction engaged many young artists… among them, perhaps Pál Deim was the first to find his own distinctive motif, the puppet figure compressed between planes in space.” According to art historian Gábor Andrási, who analyzed Deim’s oeuvre in greater detail, “Closely tied to the traditions of Szentendre – to the world of Orthodox icons and to the reconciliation of transparent structural clarity with symbolization – Pál Deim, throughout that decade [the 1960s, W. T.], gradually unfolded the possibilities inherent in the central motif of his painting, the stylized, puppet-like human figure. In his panel paintings, screen prints, painted reliefs projecting from the surface, and sculptures, the ‘puppet’ appeared at times in a strictly geometric context, at times in looser fields of color, sometimes in ‘action,’ sometimes immobile, rendered in daring foreshortening…” Alongside scholarly analyses, one must also recall the poetic interpretation of the writer Géza Páskándi, which Pál Deim himself considered among the most important: “Pál Deim’s art has discovered the so-called divine proportion. He holds in his strong hand the apothecary’s balance of ideal dosage. He preserves the equilibrium of faith and reason, so that it may be the diamond-like axis. Deim’s puppets, his idols, are constant, and yet never untouched. Something always brushes against them, and yet they remain unchanged. One is an idol, but it moves on and becomes something of a cradle... In one idol everything is gathered, all closed up, the other is dynamically radiating outwards. And in its colours, everything is in harmony with these extremes. The sight is placed again in the ancient rights of the secret yet can converse with us. The conversing silence, the arrowing silence, which also receives the arrow of the universe... When we look at such works, we are again and again confronted with the unspoken great question of our time: do we have a hint of whether we really want to discover the mystery of the beginning and the end, or is it enough for us to be always aware that there is a beginning and an end, so that we may be directed towards the task of life, of man, of the direction which the Most High has ordained?"
Among the series of works born under the spell of the puppet figure and form, certain pieces have been ennobled into masterpieces of 20th–21st-century Hungarian art, emblematic representations of the oeuvre as a whole: the works of the series Feljegyzések egy kolostorban (Notes in a Monastery), the Csend-kompozíciók (Silence Compositions), the relief Minden értelmetlenül meghalt ember emlékére (In Memory of Every Person Who Died Meaninglessly), and the variations on Kőműves Kelemenné and Golgotha. Beyond their intrinsic value, these works also testify to Pál Deim’s confident command of diverse artistic branches and techniques, his facility across media – painting, graphics, sculpture, and stained-glass – and his freedom to move between the dimensions of surface and space.
The etchings that recall his academy years and appeared as an interlude in the 1990s; the oil paintings, early and later, returning with ever more powerful expression; the pen and brush drawings, pastels and watercolors, autolithographs, screen prints, collages, reliefs and small sculptures; the monumental works that found a home in urban spaces; and the stained-glass windows and reliefs created in conjunction with architecture – all of these not only document the artist’s versatility but also his broad mastery of craft. Each work by Deim is realized with extraordinary precision and perfection, with inventive technical knowledge, synthesizing material and form into a harmonious unity.
The vast body of work by Pál Deim emerged in the last third of the 20th century and the first decade and a half of the new millennium in Szentendre, born in the orbit of the town’s tradition, marked by a synthesizing intent and summarizing force, mysterious and enigmatic, radiating both universality and locality at once. Perhaps, as the most important convergence of universality and locality, it is unnecessary to emphasize the intimate connection between painter Pál Deim and the town and spirit of Szentendre. Yet for the sake of clarity – and because of its fertile implications – let us recall the Master’s own words on this relationship, in which he reflected as follows: “Szentendre was characterized by a meditative quality; I grew up here. I regularly visited the exhibitions of Szentendre’s painters, and it was always this intimate world that captivated me. But this does not lead to narrowness, for this inwardly matured world can also expand into universality. However personal and intimate the abstraction of Lajos Vajda or Jenő Barcsay may be, it rises into the universal. In some cases, the local values are emphasized – and that too is something to be cherished. The transformation of small matters into great ones – this is a strange, magical process that cannot be avoided, and it also captivated me.”
The transformation of small matters into great ones – perhaps the formula is indeed this simple, perhaps with this artistic confession the oeuvre can be deciphered, the mystery of Deim’s works of essential purity can be unraveled, and the totality and personal nature of his art, with its symbolic density and intellectual depth, may become readily interpretable and deeply felt. Deim’s compositions, embedded in both Eastern and European iconographic traditions, with self-evident simplicity and with a creative intent probing the secrets of existence, commemorate the human being seeking his place and longing for solace amid the contradictions of the world.
[2013]