Pál Gerzson’s career as a painter began in the mid-1950s and came to an end in 2008. Spanning almost six decades, his oeuvre comprises a vast body of work dominated by easel paintings (as well as watercolours and graphic works), but also including site-specific compositions created for public interiors and therefore never capable of being presented in exhibition halls. These works also highlight Gerzson’s extraordinary versatility as an artist: he painted frescoes and panels, designed stained-glass windows and produced wood inlays, as well as designing enamel murals and tapestries. His monumental works can be found in Budapest, Kunszentmiklós, Szeged, Pécs, Mátészalka and Helsinki. And if we look beyond the works presented to the public in exhibition spaces, we must also mention his work as a teacher and art educator. For decades he taught at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts and later at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where, first as a teacher and later as head of department, he helped launch the careers of successive generations of artists. Equally important was his work as an organiser and his commitment to the artistic community: the various positions he held in artists’ associations, his organisational responsibilities, and his service as president of the Association of Hungarian Fine Artists during the particularly difficult period of the 1990s all add further dimensions and richness to his artistic profile.
In the second half of the 1950s, his interest turned towards compositions that transposed elements of reality and human figures onto the picture plane and arranged them within a structured order, as well as with the problems of representing air and light. Around the turn of the 1960s, influenced by his experiences in Hódmezővásárhely, he moved away from the naturalistic depiction of reality and began constructing paintings from geometrically conceived motifs. From the 1960s onwards, his abstract works were characterised by a Cubist approach and mode of pictorial construction. A decisive change came with his Szigliget period, which began around the turn of the 1970s: he abstracted his experiences of the landscape, together with the problems of light and colour that were central to his art, into decorative planar compositions animated by vivid colour. Alongside mural techniques, his art was defined primarily by compositions painted in oil on canvas, although he also painted watercolours and produced ink and pencil drawings.
Gerzson’s oeuvre developed through continuous changes, modifications, shifts and transformations, with successive artistic experiences layered upon one another. Like many twentieth-century artists, particularly those of Central Europe, Pál Gerzson followed a path that gradually led him away from naturalistic representation, figurative depiction and painterly description. Initially he turned towards the stylisation of elements of reality – his early works were compositions referring to figures and objects and evoking scenes – before crossing the threshold into a world of abstraction that opened up new possibilities of artistic creation and expression. This transition took place around the turn of the 1970s. As a result, concrete elements gradually disappeared or were transformed, recognisable forms dissolved or became veiled in sign-like motifs, until the canvases ultimately retained only fantasy images of colours and forms woven from free painterly associations. Here the painterly imagination could soar freely: centuries-old conventions of image-making no longer constrained the hand holding the brush, or the artistic intention and thought guiding that hand. Perspective, foreground, middle ground, background and horizon could all be cast aside, allowing space to expand without limit; mysterious planes and enigmatic depths entered into dialogue with one another, while the creation of forms was likewise liberated. There was no longer any compulsion to identify forms or make them correspond to external reality; the motifs became governed by their own internal laws. Composed of large pictorial elements, these works arose from an associative interpretation of nature and reality, which could in turn be enriched by further layers of associations on the part of the viewer. Perhaps the best and most vivid example of this method of image-making and pictorial interpretation is the Fecskék I–IX. (Swallows I–IX) series, painted in 1990–1991. With just a slender black segment enclosed by a few curved contours and set in contrast against white, it evokes the small migratory bird that nests in Hungary, without the bird itself ever actually appearing on the canvas: only in our feelings and as images from our memories.
Alongside the swallow compositions, we could devote extensive analysis to the works inspired by Lake Balaton and Szigliget, which in terms of genre might be classified as landscapes or, more precisely, as landscape fantasies, painterly visions of landscape. He summed up his experiences as a painter in this field in Szigliget csodái I–XIII. (The Wonders of Szigliget I–XIII), a series of oils on canvas painted in 1989. Within the visual field of these Gerzson paintings, we witness the flickering of reflections of light and colour, subtle mirrorings, the elusive merging of the boundaries and colours of water and sky, virtual movements, the interplay of hard and soft systems, and the kaleidoscopic appearance of angular planes and softly curving patches and forms that seem to spill into space, all organised into a disciplined compositional order. In these assemblages of motifs, sometimes the harmony of a monochrome palette, reduced to a single colour and its shades, prevails, while at other times tension is created by the emphasis placed on a particular patch of colour. Yet everything is permeated by a sense of memory, a sensitive lyricism, and a kind of yearning for harmony and serenity, nourished by the Pannonian spirit and seemingly on the verge of fulfilment. At the opening of one of Pál Gerzson’s exhibitions some twenty years ago, the distinguished art historian Katalin Dávid pointed out that in the patches, colours, planes and spaces of this artist’s painting – a characteristically Central European, Carpathian Basin and Hungarian form of painting – we can discover the meeting point of East and West, North and South. And at this intersection, the spirit of a modernity rooted in tradition is at work, while every impulse towards image-making is driven by an unquenchable longing for happiness.
That these attempts at interpretation and pictorial description are neither art-historical fantasies nor entirely subjective and arbitrary deductions is also confirmed by one of Pál Gerzson’s poetic statements. In his work Fények, felhők (Lights, Clouds), published in the 1990s, he wrote: “The subject of my work is the reflection of life’s chain of cause and effect. The instrument of my work is painting. Its birthplace and setting is Hungary, more specifically Transdanubia, where I can call a small patch of land my own. This is Szigliget. All my thoughts spring from here, but the things that follow from them I can accomplish anywhere. Except for tending the land and all that belongs to it, the vineyard and the house, because for those I really do have to go there. The vineyard has two great assets: its distinguished location in the heart of the Badacsony wine region, and the fact that this same place offers an inexhaustibly laden table for the insatiable eye. An intimate yet magnificent earthly paradise, nurturing yet spurring one on to struggle! … The lights, clouds, stones, birds and worms of Szigliget, the Bakony wind and mists, together with the vineyard, ripen and condense an image of the completeness of the world into the acidic, crystalline wine and into the suppleness of the lines of the picture.”
Through the oeuvre of the painter Pál Gerzson, a spiritually uplifting world of painting opens before us, one that encompasses and reflects with remarkable precision and seemingly effortless naturalness the distinctive features and essential characteristics of the age in which it arose and the place that inspired the works, while creating beauty of extraordinary inventiveness. What unfolds before us is a painting that is intimate yet monumental, guided by a resolute artistic intention to encompass, grasp and reflect the fullness of reality.
[2014]