Alajos Eszik’s first steps towards the visual arts can be traced back to the age of eight. It was then that he joined, as a founding member, the newly established Holló László Képzőművészeti Kör (Holló László Fine Arts Circle) in Kiskunfélegyháza, where his mentor was Miklós Bodor. “There, adults were drawing and painting around me. I was passionately devoted to drawing, the only child in the Circle. The sessions were held in the cells of the city museum’s former prison section, and it was there that I drew my first ovals, jugs, still lifes, and arrangements. Miklós Bodor later played an important role in shaping my career as well: it was at his insistence, sent by telegram (‘Lojzi, quit kayaking STOP start drawing again STOP’), that I took up drawing again before my school-leaving examinations.” He was not admitted to the Képzőművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian College of Fine Arts) [now: Hungarian University of Fine Arts] at his first attempt, so he obtained a degree in drawing and geography at the teacher training college in Szeged. He was later admitted to the College of Fine Arts, completing one year in the evening programme as a student of Gábor Nagy, followed by two years studying painting under the guidance of Szilárd Iván.From the third year onwards, he continued his studies in the field of printmaking, where his teachers were Károly Raszler, Tibor Rozanics and Imre Kocsis, and his classmates included András Böröcz, Gábor Roskó, László Révész and Gyula Július. At that time, other students at the college included Frigyes Kőnig, Miklós Dolnik, as well as József Szurcsik, József Gaál and Sándor Rácmolnár. His teaching career began in his sixth year, when he was invited to lead a two-year foundation course in printmaking. He then taught at the institute for thirty-six years, from 1983 until his retirement in 2018. Between 2005 and 2014 he also worked as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Drawing and Art History, Institute of Art, Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education at the University of Szeged.
Alajos Eszik works in all traditional graphic techniques. He has produced etchings, aquatints, lithographs, linocuts, serigraphs, pastels, as well as unique graphic works and drawings. He paints in watercolour, oil and acrylic.
He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His works can be found, among others, in the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria (Hungarian National Gallery), the Pécsi Modern Könyvtár (Modern Library of Pécs), the Damjanich János Museum of Szolnok, the (Herman Ottó Museum of Miskolc, the József Attila Museum of Makó, the Kiskunfélegyházi Kiskun Múzeum (Kiskun Museum of Kiskunfélegyháza), the Balassagyarmati Jánossy Képtár (Jánossy Gallery of Balassagyarmat), and the collection of the Óbuda Museum. Since 1993 he has operated a private gallery in Sopron under the name 78-as Galéria (Gallery 78), providing exhibition opportunities for contemporary Hungarian artists.
“In the absence of a chosen tradition, you are like an infant left on the steps of a church. Even later, you can never truly know who you really are,” he declared in his inaugural address at the Hungarian Academy of Arts. “Art history is a point of reference and a source of inspiration. The great masters of bodily expression – Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Rodin, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Horst Janssen – are all shining examples, magnificent predecessors.”
Alajos Eszik, though primarily a figurative and body-centred artist, identifies a wide range of predecessors, including Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin with his still lifes and genre scenes, and, among the painters of Venice, Maria Crespi and Battista Piazzetta – the latter being, for him, a model of how colourism and drawing can perfectly complement one another. Among Hungarian painters he mentions Simon Hollósy and Béla Kondor, while speaking of German artists he noted: “Horst Janssen, Richter and Anselm Kiefer are close to me, though I would never be as extreme as Horst Janssen, for whom nothing exists any longer but death and eroticism – who depicts nothing but the perpetual struggle between Eros and Thanatos.
There is in me a touch of the jovial provincial, the sort who tells anecdotes over a spritzer – a trait missing from such harsh, extreme creators. One might picture a rather Hungarian figure, a resident of a small country manor, sipping his spritzer in his little house, offering pipe-scented wisdom on the world.
I do not consider myself either a progressive or a conservative artist. I see neither in the past nor in the future any qualities that must be embraced with devotion. My criticism extends to everything.”
In his oeuvre, drawing is the primary means of expression. His career cannot be divided into distinct periods; the passage of time is reflected mainly in the techniques he has employed: “I have always used those techniques that were available to me and did not require much space, as I had no studio until the very recent past. As a university student, I had an abundance of possibilities and could try every technique. After finishing the university, I produced for a time large, multi-figure panels, revelling in highly individualised characters. No doubt I wished to express my admiration for the variety of human physique and physiognomy. Over time, there was always a favorite among the techniques available to me, which I used until I got tired of it, then I switched to another technique. Unique drawings, watercolour, oil painting, pastel and the various printmaking techniques – this is more or less my palette. All sorts of ‘gadgets’ with which one can also make art remain, to me, a secret, a mystery, something unattainable.”
From the very beginning, Alajos Eszik has been passionately interested in the human figure – movement, freedom, struggle. He frequently depicts human nakedness; his figures are often battling, fallen, exposed or solitary. “We may speak of bodily beauty. I draw many naked people. I am convinced that every inch of the body says something different in every situation. There are sad, tiny bottoms, sharp little elbows, jovial bellies, exhausted varicose legs. Each has a story. The human figure, in its ideal beauty, is like the Venere di Urbino – flawless. It flows across the picture from left to right like a natural phenomenon, the earthly embodiment of the Platonic idea. Yes, but in life we batter this beautiful creature, this imagined object, this realised ideal – we trample it, stab it in the back, crush it, desecrate it, subject it to all manner of things. In essence, the human body endures its own passion over the course of life. Sometimes it is good to depict the human body in a moment when it is not humiliated or oppressed, but stretching, like a cat in the warmth of the oven corner.”
“In my works, you can see that the main motif is a wavering figure, a person with an uncertain fate. This clearly speaks of the human being’s vulnerability to forces greater than himself. This is true existential insecurity. Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ‘Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.’ You can see that I draw many naked figures, and the explanation is that in bodily expression every inch of the figure speaks. Besides, I admire the human body as a creation of God. Its suffering, its humiliation – they are passion stories.”
“I envy those who can animate objects, landscapes or abstract forms at a high level, but I do not belong among them. I am interested in the movements of the figure. Open arcs of movement speak of freedom, of ecstatic and rapturous moments of timeless happiness. Inarticulate flailing gestures speak of doomed attempts – storms of movement answering unanswerable questions. At times, the figure sinking into itself, apathetic, tells of a temporary surrender in the struggle.”
“I hardly know any Hungarian artist who relies so fully on the variational possibilities inherent in bodily expression,” writes Pál Szuromi of Alajos Eszik’s work. “This is as romantic and impressive as an intellectual stance. (…) Moreover, this active, energetic handling of the figure has its own intellectual inheritances. I need only refer to the excitement of its thematic and emotional wanderings, or perhaps to its potential for truth-telling. Let us not forget: with our extreme, heated gestures we can scarcely pretend, scarcely dissemble. These are still relatively clean, unspoilt territories.”
“What is symbolic in my work points to elaborated, commonly agreed topoi, because I want to provide points of orientation concerning my intentions, which are fundamentally honest. I find excessive symbolist interpretation distasteful – the kind that offers a repository of symbolic readings for the whole image and for every detail alike. It leaves the ordinary viewer with the sense that without studies in iconology and the like, the picture has no approachable level at all. This is why I use mythological and biblical framing themes, for their familiarity can still be assumed within the European cultural sphere.”
Many see these figures as grotesque, which is contrary to Alajos Eszik’s intentions: “I do not like the grotesque, because it diminishes the stakes, presenting life as the petty play of petty heroes. There you are: pathetic creatures, engaged in the battle of mice and frogs. At best, the grotesque reveals the flawed human being, whose flaws we share. Some believe my works are illustrative, but this is a misconception. My figures may well prompt a story, but they are not themselves generated by stories. In the end, my works are narrative, but the narrative is the consequence, not the cause.”
“Eszik is one of the most brilliant draughtsmen working in the field today, a true virtuoso,” writes István Sinkó in the 21 February 2020 issue of Élet és Irodalom, in an article entitled E. A. on the occasion of Alajos Eszik’s retrospective exhibition at the Vigadó Galéria (Vigadó Gallery). “His sheets are ideas cast into drawing – full of humour, wry irony, critique and jest; soaring parables and fables. They remain drawings, whether he renders them in watercolour, lithography, etching or tempera. Colour is more of an added value; what matters above all is the vigorous, dynamic articulation of line. In Alajos Eszik’s works, the assurance of line found in Klimt, Horst Janssen and Schiele is fused with Daumier’s biting satire. His figures are solitary warriors of life, resurrecting and falling like fallen angels, despairing and languid townsfolk, striving and ambitious, flailing boys and girls. Men and women of fate. They are embedded in the mire of ‘post-Kádárism’ [refers to the cultural and social atmosphere in Hungary following the end of János Kádár’s socialist regime] (brooding in bathtubs, soaking themselves in washbasins), basking in the sunlight of freedom, and carousing, posturing, devoutly posing… Alajos Eszik presents all his characters as lonely beings – leaping, dancing, falling, crouching and fighting individuals (among more than a hundred works, barely a few contain multi-figure compositions). For Eszik, the realm of meaning includes the attribute: an accessory, a ball, a stick, an axe, or indeed an imagined creature (Leviathan, a fish, a rabbit, a bear), which appears as a secondary figure strengthening the quotational structure of the composition.”
Elsewhere, István Sinkó refers, in a sharply ironic tone, to Alajos Eszik’s works as ‘independence-war drawings’, and poses the question: in what sense is he a warrior? The answer is: in the sense that he cannot be shaken for a moment; he knows contemporary trends perfectly well, yet steadfastly represents his own style and way of thinking. This war is the struggle of an independent creator against an artistic world increasingly driven by the pressure to conform.
József Gáll writes that Eszik is a free man, one who has never become a loyal soldier of any trend. For him, the state of the soul, its temperament, can be expressed only through the depiction of the human figure. Such directness requires honesty. At the same time, Eszik does not consider himself a warrior: “Regarding artistic freedom, my view is this: I have never felt compulsion, never felt that anyone was trying to direct me or exert pressure on me. At most, I was not accepted if someone found what I was doing unpleasant. There is such a thing as interior-decorative painting, whose sole aesthetic category is pleasantness – that it should harmonise with the wallpaper. Most of my works are not meant to be hung in the drawing room. At the same time, the old rulers always had their little wunderkammern, their private corners, where they displayed either great obscenities or things they did not wish to show their visitors. My works also fit into that category. Not that I depict great obscenities, but my works do not belong to the category of salon pictures – although I have no poor opinion of such pictures either,” says Alajos Eszik.
He does not consider himself a realist, and he finds the term itself unusable and meaningless in art: “If we bring into the realm of the real the world that surrounds the human being, the experiential material filtered through the subjectivity of the individual, then it is all realia,” explains Alajos Eszik. “In fact, everyone is a realist, and if everyone is a realist, then the word means nothing. So it is not suitable for distinguishing between two people. I find the term ‘realism’ so boundless that I see no sense in using it.”
Alajos Eszik regards his sarcastic, ironic – or, in István Sinkó’s words, ‘wryly realist’ – worldview as specifically Eastern European, and particularly characteristic of the Czechs and the Poles. These peoples developed this way of seeing and behaving as a form of self-defence against the perpetual 'bullying' by the great powers: “for what remains to us if we cannot mock those who toy with us? Only lamentation, sorrow, jeremiad.” This contradiction was illustrated by one of his exhibitions, which he titled Lelkendezések és siránkozások (Exultations and Lamentations). According to the concept, the works exhibited there exulted in the beauty of the world and lamented what human beings are doing to this created world.
“The painter must be a labourer,” and “the artist must be able to account for their conscience,” Eszik believes. “The status of an artist can be possessed, and it can be usurped. Whoever does not work should not call themselves an artist; to me, such a person is not credible. If one wants a beautiful view, one must make the effort, climb the mountain, and there must be something there. As for conscience, one must not deceive the viewer, must not entice them by saying: come, work, and you will receive something from me – while my hands are empty. There are those who claim that everything an artist does is art, or who debate whether someone remains an artist even when they fall silent, like Rimbaud. And another question is whether someone who produces weak, poor works can still be called an artist. And when does art become art? I am convinced that in the reverently admired collections of museums there are plenty of works that are more cultural-historical documents than art.”
An integral part of Alajos Eszik’s oeuvre is the decades of teaching he carried out in the Department of Printmaking at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts, later the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He recalls it as follows: “When I began teaching, I was not a good teacher, because I thought that everyone had to follow the same path as I had. That is, you had to draw until your nose bled, until, after much study, the figure became such an inner image that, with a slight abstraction or stylisation, anyone could shape it into their own likeness and thus create an independent graphic world. In my defence, I had seen no other example. I was at the college all day long; we lived there, making friendships that lasted a lifetime. Later I had to realise that artistic activity can be pursued by entirely different methods, and that you can establish an independent professional profile in various ways. Gradually I moderated my voluntarism, I controlled and manoeuvred myself from a directing role into more of a supporting position. It was a very interesting and difficult task to teach a profession from which you cannot make a living. To utter optimistic slogans about what my students might achieve with this knowledge. For almost every trained printmaker is forced to live from something else, and their primary profession is devalued into a hobby. It was a great challenge: to show them the pathos of the profession, the beauty of the craft, and at the same time to tell them honestly that they would not earn a single penny with it. I loved my students, the school, every one of its steps, and my studio on the third floor, the former Bernáth studio. I loved being there. It was an experience that new talents always arrived, each different from the last. It was good to witness that, from time to time, someone would come along who overturned everything we taught – someone who would begin the figure at the left ear and continue with the right toe, without making any sketch at all – and it would work. And my jaw dropped. To experience that methods are merely guides, crutches of mediocrity, and that such rules do not apply to extraordinary talent.”
Finally, a few sentences from Alajos Eszik that might be called the artist’s ars poetica: “You can draw with anything – with a finger on a misted window, with a stick in the dust, with urine in the snow, with a slate pencil on a slate board, with charcoal, chalk, pencil, ink, pen, reed, water, soot, coffee, wine, with teeth, with nails – in short, with anything.
And why do we draw? Just because. Just for its own sake. Even so and in spite of everything. And meanwhile, ‘That seeing they may see us, that seeing they may see us’.”
[2024]