Although Péter Jecza’s form of expression stemmed from the neo-avant-garde, he consistently regarded himself as a figurative sculptor. His compact, solidly impactful style, fundamentally rooted in constructivism, is free of transient fashion trends, and in his works decorativeness is subordinated to meaning and conceptual content. Gusztáv Herédi, writing in issue 1967/8 of the journal Korunk (lit. Our Time), referred to him as the ‘sculptor of concepts’. Jecza’s most defining themes are noble ideals, freedom, love, longing and the search for harmony, while in most of his works the potential for drama and conflict is also present. Alongside dynamically conceived compositions, massive works with a closed formal order appear frequently in his oeuvre. In his sculpture he conveys geometric principles with great subtlety, creating novel relationships between surfaces and masses, and he “captures the compact formations of balance and disturbed symmetry, of opposition and harmony, of movement and stillness in varied plastic forms”.
For a long time he sought his own form of expression by taking into account the achievements of primitive and tribal art, so highly valued by expressionism, and his idea was to achieve this through the simplification of composition. After seeing Henry Moore’s 1966 exhibition in Bucharest, his style changed radically, and for years he worked under the influence of the English sculptor’s oeuvre. In his early sculpture Gyökér (Root), the impact of Henry Moore is unmistakable. “The echoing curves, the expressive, chain-like sequence of depressions, and the widened opening dominating the central part of the composition together create a distinctive geometry and strong inner tension.” During this period he created several sculptures that allude to the formal worlds of Bourdelle, Brancusi, Arp or Hepworth. Later, the works of Giacomo Manzù, discovered during one of his journeys to Italy, also had a strong influence on his artistic development.
The greater part of Jecza’s oeuvre can be read as three-dimensional reflections of the tensions inherent in a bipolar world order. In his sculptures, up and down, new and old, solidity and lightness, as well as different geometric forms, above all the two basic shapes, the sphere and the cube, confront one another eye to eye. These eternal oppositions can be translated from the conceptual plane into reality as well, just as Jecza’s small-scale, almost abstract art shown in exhibition spaces, when transferred into public space, becomes increasingly figurative and realistic. His attention often turns toward the stylised depiction of the relationship between the two human poles, man and woman.
The artist’s public activity is characterised by a commitment to harmony, reconciliation and the recognition of shared values, and in his art as well he considers the search for unity and balance to be essential. “Péter Jecza’s finest sculptures simultaneously refer to the universal unity of the cosmos, the primordial cell that forms the basis of organic life, the closed nature of geometric structures, and the cosmic force of erotic passion, of living together, with one another and for one another. His sculptures symbolise not only the coming together of woman and man and their shared happiness, but also the dialectical unity of opposing poles.” This is how his monographer, János Szekernyés, describes his work. This aspiration is also evident in the title of one of his series begun in the late 1970s, Monádok (Monads). In Greek philosophy, the monad represents the foundation of all existence, the indivisible and perfect unity, while for Leibniz it denotes the unique and indivisible substance of the world. Jecza drew on Greek culture on other occasions, too. His composition depicting Nike, the goddess of victory, was unveiled in 2010 in Sfântu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyörgy).
He believed that art possesses a power capable of transcending borders. He strove to create works not limited to themes connected with Hungarian identity, which he could hardly have done otherwise given his Romanian ancestry on his father’s side, and his activity was not confined to the themes of the Banat peoples either. Rather, through each of his works he sought to articulate a universal message.
In a 1977 interview he formulated his view by saying that art speaks to everyone, “but not every artist and not every movement speaks to everyone, rather it is the whole of fine arts that does. Artists and different stylistic tendencies must together, supporting and complementing one another, satisfy the extraordinarily diverse needs and expectations. In fact, what we must achieve is that in the art of our age every category of viewer should find works, creators or movements that correspond to their personality and taste and satisfy them fully, anywhere in the world. Only then, and only in this way, can art fulfil its social function.”
Works created in the different creative periods of Péter Jecza are clearly distinguishable. At first he was close to socialist realism, which was soon replaced by avant-garde sculpture. The dramatic force of his early wooden work Kiáltás (Cry), repeatedly reworked over time, can be related to the expressionist works of Endre Kusztos. Several of his wooden sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s were shown at the 1978 Venice Biennale. In his early years he also produced stone sculptures, which were generally connected to the depiction of femininity. Several of his cast stone sculptures can still be seen today in the Alpinet Park in Timișoara (Temesvár), on the banks of the Bega.
From 1972 onwards he exhibited regularly in Germany, both in occasional and survey exhibitions. At his first exhibition in Wuppertal, his small and medium-sized bronze sculptures, described as “moderately stylised, carefully rounded and polished to a mirror-like finish”, achieved unanimous success with the public.
More than ten years later, in Cologne, he presented 35 expressive bronze sculptures. At this event, which he regarded as an important milestone in his artistic career, he sought to outline the main directions of his sculptural practice and to illustrate the creative process itself: “In several compositions it was possible to follow the most important stages of abstraction and artistic reduction. At my exhibition even those who encountered my work for the first time could clearly see how I progress from biomorphic forms, from human figures and gestures, to split cubes and pure geometric shapes.” A photograph of his sculpture Főnix (Phoenix) was published in the Stuttgart-based journal Das Kunstwerk.
At his Cologne exhibition he attempted to express two themes through sculptural means, freedom and love: “I tried to erect memorials to the heroes and victims of struggles for freedom, while the other main thematic motif of the works on display was the contemporary representation of the joys of life, of intimate moments, of love.”
Gaining insight into conditions abroad, he came to the view that fine arts as a whole were permeated by the overdriven and pathologically accelerated rhythm of Western life. At the unchecked pace of everyday life, the situation of artists became more difficult year by year. Moreover, the promoters of sculpture, art critics and gallerists alike, were also struggling, since the new tendencies emerging in fine arts, such as happenings, land art, body art and similar practices, “created improvised works of art that existed and had an effect only for a limited time, and which could not be taken home and preserved.” Jecza’s strongly abstracted works with stylised forms and his constructivism thus represent a conscious return to the materialism of avant-garde sculpture. The Baukunst Galerie in Cologne had, over the course of its history, exhibited a number of works by the most renowned avant-garde artists, including Braque, Chagall, Klee, the German Expressionists as well as French Impressionists and Dadaists.
By the turn of the millennium his bronzes had become increasingly compact, their surfaces often irregular, rough and scratched into raster-like textures. In 2005 he presented his works at the large-scale group exhibition Formavilág – 20 temesvári alkotóművész (lit. World of Form – 20 Artists from Timișoara) at the headquarters of the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists. Jecza once remarked that, in formal terms, he was preoccupied with the complex phenomena of external and internal explosion... For his style, which is based on massive geometric elements, bronze proved to be an ideal material. He often polished the surfaces of his works, “so that the metallic sheen would emphasise and multiply the monumentality and exciting modernity of the spatial concept, and so that the richly reflected, gliding lights would accentuate the lyrical delicacy and powerful expressiveness of the curved, rounded forms.”
Although Péter Jecza created enduring works in the field of small-scale sculpture as well, he regarded public, monumental sculpture as the highest form of his art. Over the course of his career he fulfilled numerous commissions for figurative sculptures. In the process of their creation he did not disregard the achievements of traditional sculpture, yet as the years passed, his forms became simpler and clearer. In his portraits, which synthesise realism and constructive tendencies, he sought to depict human greatness and the representation of ‘individuality’.
His busts primarily portray prominent figures of Hungarian and Romanian history, literature, science and music, many of them from the region. Most of these works can be found in the capital of the Banat, Timișoara, though a significant number of his sculptures are located in Székely Land.
The portrait of Zoltán Franyó, born in Kismargita (Banatska Dubica), dates from 1964. It was followed by the sculpture of the Romanian mathematician Dimitrie Pompeiu in 1968, which was installed in the inner courtyard of the central building of the Timișoara University of Science. The 1969 bust of the world-renowned orientalist and founder of Tibetology, Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, who was from Székely Land, can be seen on the main square of Covasna (Kovászna). Jecza modelled the bust of the sculptor Romul Ladea in 1972. The site of György Dózsa’s birthplace in Dalnic (Dálnok) is marked by an obelisk and a bronze portrait designed by Jecza in 1977. (The full-figure statue of Dózsa in the settlement was created a year earlier by András Szobotka on the basis of plans by Sándor Plugor.)
In 1989, the bust of the traveller Sándor Bölöni Farkas, who had also visited America and likewise came from Covasna, was erected. The bust of the ethnographer János Kriza was unveiled in 1990 in the centre of Aiza Mare (Nagyajta), while the sculpture of Béla Bartók has stood in his birthplace, Sânnicolau Mare (Nagyszentmiklós), since 1993.
The bronze portrait of the Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache is an exception, as it was inaugurated outside Transylvania, in the vestibule of the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest.
In the park of the Banat Museum stands the large-scale sculpture Temetetlen holtak (Unburied Dead), which commemorates the victims of the tragic events that took place in Romania in 1989.
He created works of ecclesiastical art throughout his entire career. The crucifix and bronze tabernacle of the Roman Catholic church in Orșova are by Péter Jecza , as are the reliefs in the chapel of the Roman Catholic church in Dumbrăvița (Újszentes). The concrete and bronze components of the work, together with the figurative and constructivist features of the composition, form an intriguing unity.
The Saint Gerard altar of the church in the Csíki quarter of Sfântu Gheorghe, along with the bronze reliefs of the Stations of the Cross displayed there, are regarded among Jecza’s most complex compositions.
His inverted-composition Piéta (Pietà) can also be considered a religious work: it depicts a woman shot during the 1989 revolution, held in her husband’s arms.
Jecza’s architecture-related activity also deserves to be mentioned. His large-scale concrete architectural sculptures symbolising construction work can be seen on the façade of the Youth Cultural Centre in Timișoara and in the square in front of the new hospital in Caransebeș (Karánsebes). During this period op art also had an impact on his works. Vasarely’s cubes and spheres at times seem to come alive in Jecza’s sculptures: “The solid, closed bronze forms, with their highly polished or more roughly left surfaces, are sometimes only just ‘touched’, gently popped open, or lightly scratched, segmented by delicate incisions; at other times, however, he cuts and splits more sharply and deeply into the shell of the regular forms with sweeping gestures, deliberately disturbing, ‘ruffling’, breaking open the cold regularity, rigid calculability and sober balance of the cubic or spherical form,” writes Szekernyés.
His versatility is demonstrated by the fact that over the course of his career a number of new movements, such as technicism and minimal art, also impacted his work. His sculpture Szárnyalás (Soaring) is described as “a monument of the space age”, and he also created ‘semi-kinetic’ sculptures and designed stage sets for the Vienna State Opera.
On his grave in Timișoara, three interpenetrating cubes can be seen between two vertical pillars.
[2015]