Alongside the contemporary groupings and associations of modern Hungarian fine art – beyond the communities linked by stylistic movements, artistic aspirations, or the unifying forces of schools – there are those artists who work in solitude, whose oeuvre can be defined as “individualistic” or “unclassifiable.” Péter Földi is one such artist: a painter who has built a self-governing, sovereign world of his own, one that by its very nature excludes a large circle of followers. His painting – and the evolution of his art – has been traceable for more than four decades.
– “Among the rolling hills, at the foot of the Karancs–Medves mountain range, in Somoskőújfalu, lives a painter,” wrote art historian Ágota H. Szilasi in the introduction to the substantial volume published in 2005 in the Kugler Könyvek series, which surveys Földi’s oeuvre. “He paints his luminous ‘meditative’ pictures about the most fundamental truths of human existence in pure colors, populated by plants and animals (storks, ducks, chickens, indeterminate birds, rabbits, cows, pigs, snakes…) that have been elevated to symbols yet still retain their original being and essence, and by human figures with schematic forms and suggestive gazes, living in ambivalent coexistence with them. Many have asked him – especially those who regard Budapest as the fountainhead of Hungarian culture – whether this voluntarily chosen provincial detachment, this existence on the periphery, is a disadvantage to his art. But for someone who paints as Péter Földi does, and for whom organic unity with nature, folk tradition, and the naïve freshness of children’s drawings are living sources of inspiration, what else could he say but, in the words of Áron Tamási: ‘We are in this world so that somewhere we may feel at home in it.’ For Péter Földi, this alone can be the foundation of honest and authentic art – attachment to the culture that can nurture and uplift us. As Lajos Vajda wrote: ‘Nothing can be done without tradition, and under Hungarian circumstances, that can only mean folk art. We look back to the past to strengthen ourselves, to preserve its values, and to pass them on to the future.’ Thus, one who – like Földi – cultivates tradition, whose art synthesizes the primitive and the modern, the archaic and the intellectually complex, cannot be provincial, and is beyond both stylistic classification and temporal limitation – an artist who, in an age of excess, obstinately follows his own measure.”
The themes, modes of depiction, and forms of expression in Földi’s painting all play upon peculiarities – the strangeness of simplicity: domestic animals, barnyard fowl, birds, and rural people are recurring figures. Titles such as A csorda (The Herd), A karám (The Pen), Csapda (Trap), and Fészekhagyók (Nest-leavers) evoke a bucolic, earth-bound world. Yet under Földi’s brush, this narrow realm of life becomes cosmic and universally resonant. His motifs, suffused with the vitality of lived experience, are enriched by the stylistic features of children’s drawings, the formal logic of folk art, and the ancient conventions of painting. (The artist has published several analytical studies on the aesthetics of children’s drawings.) His large canvases, built of unified surfaces and illusionistic color-fields, painted in vivid, decorative palettes, are filled with deep symbolic meaning and the tension of peculiar motifs. Through unusual framings, unexpected viewpoints, planar compositions, and metamorphoses, distortions, and transformations, animal and human qualities blur, exchange, and fuse, charged with unexpected new significance.
In connection with these panel paintings, watercolours, and graphics that flicker between the boundaries of the fantastic and the realistic, the eminent art historian Magdolna Supka – who followed Földi’s oeuvre for decades – aptly observed, when analysing the works exhibited in 2000 at the Vigadó Gallery in Budapest:
– “From idyll to drama, from genre scene to a scene of death, Földi’s vision of fate darkens into masterpieces of rare sensitivity in the depiction of the soul – works in which, as he himself confesses, he sees the expression of emotions and passions more vividly and truthfully in the gaze and gestures of animals than in those of humans. … After sequences of paintings laden with ominous foreboding, it seems that the artist regards love – the force that sustains the continuity of life – as the greatest mystery of our earthly existence.”
Just as in his earlier works, so too in the new and most recent ones, only the distilled pictorial essence remains fixed: for more than four and a half decades now, Péter Földi has been painting – with oil on canvas and wooden panels, with watercolour and ink on handmade paper, and drawing with pencil – those images that can be regarded as typically “Földi.” Humans, real and imagined animals – or beings perceived as both real and imagined – appear before white or pink backgrounds, or rather within these pale colour-planes, or else emerge from a brownish-black, mysterious half-light. The space – the painting’s space – is always neutral: there is no landscape, no environment. The figure, the form, the bird, the creature – shifting, metamorphosing from human-faced to animal-faced, from animal to human – almost always dominates the picture’s field. This pictorial field is not governed by linear perspective; or if it is, then by a multi-point viewing system that creates further spatial complexities – as though, within this intricate structure, everything was slightly planar. Large patches of colour form the living tissue of the motifs’ chromatic world; contours close systematically, forms are unsettlingly self-contained, outlines are emphasized, and detail is generally absent. It is as if the painter would engrave undisturbed, pure, emblematic imprints into our visual memory. The world contained in these works – and therefore the world of the works themselves – is unique, strange, extraordinary, and curious. Although it may seem simple, it is in fact densely layered, unresolved, and laden with multiple meanings; encapsulated in symbols and at times in iconographic topoi; always concealing transcendent mysteries; grasping the awkwardness and beauty of existence; conveying and eliciting sensations and thoughts that are at once painful and beautiful.
This painting, which poses questions about mysteries, has for decades been accompanied by essays, studies, and books – and again and again one must refer to the art historian Magdolna Supka, who provided the most perceptive interpretation of this painter’s art:
– “At first impression, Péter Földi’s world affects our temperament – the vivid rhythm of colour and composition, and the playfulness of the scenes delight us, while the hidden tragic tone startles, and this duality, which shimmers through the atmosphere of the works, is akin to the realm of untranslatable dreams. Perhaps because the poles of feelings – fear and protection – in our dreams become events, take shape, and upon waking continue to live and resonate for a time with the sharpness of real experience, yet their origin and meaning grow all the more elusive the more rationally we approach their decoding. Such is the nature of this pictorial world: the artist renders familiar, open-air scenes with concrete drawing and lifelike realism, and we, as viewers, surrender to the charm and humour of his presentation. But what makes us increasingly reflective is the question: who are these painted characters? For the longer we look at them, the more significant they become in their collective presence – as if all the intelligence and sentience of every living being on earth were, through them, sending out its SOS signals from behind the mask of their silence, awakening humanity to the mortal peril of its self-destructive impulses and its corruption of our planet.”
A separate chapter could be devoted to the small bronze sculptures created after the turn of the millennium. It is notable that certain painters and graphic artists – such as Aladár Almásy, Tamás Kárpáti, and Ákos Muzsnay – reach a moment in their careers when they turn toward sculpture: when they must step out of the confinement of the plane, detach themselves from the sphere of illusionism, and experience the magic of giving real embodiment to things.
Like those of his contemporaries, Földi’s bronzes – sometimes partially painted – break far from the conventions of sculpture: the painter’s eye intersects with the traditional processes of mass and form creation, of shaping material and organizing space, subverting the customary order of sculptural form. Földi’s creatures, enclosed in their solitude and their charming ugliness, crouch in themselves or huddle on their wheeled stands, concentrating in themselves the surrounding space with intense focus. They are ugly and beautiful, distorted and proportionate, frightening and endearing. Just like Földi’s painting and graphic art, his sculpture has also become an essential field of study for chroniclers and analysts of modern Hungarian art.
[2016]