Developed steadily since the 1970s, the oeuvre of Tamás Kárpáti has been shaped through an exceptionally slow and deliberate process of work. His paintings were matured through sustained meditation and reflection, and, in attempts at their description and interpretation, a wide range of significant considerations may be brought into play. One could analyse the tenacious continuation of the tradition of classical image-making, the masterly handling of oil paint that recalls the greatest predecessors, and the reverent preservation of the grandeur of the classical pictorial form: in his works, there is no formal transgression, no use of mixed media, no sleight of hand or gimmickry. One might examine the near-total quality of a colourism of extraordinary sensitivity, and, in this context, refer to a line of argument put forward by Bálint Chikán more than thirty years ago, in 1978, according to which “the colours, through sensitively modulated and delicately sustained tonalities, determine the fundamental mood of the works. In his paintings, there are never sharp contrasts; within individual canvases, there is no opposition between warm and cool colours.” One could further probe the transcendence and sacrality permeating these works, study the complex system of biblical references interwoven with occasional, even peculiar emphases, and reflect on the evocation of nature elevated into strangeness and dissolved into fragmentariness, as well as on the magically boundless open space that animates the works’ chilling atmosphere. Quoting Bálint Chikán once again: “In almost all of his paintings, the pictorial action unfolds in an exterior space, that is, in the open air, allowing the painter to compose space and sky freely and to evoke a sense of infinity and boundlessness. Kárpáti deliberately refrains from using a sharply defined horizon; the space into which he places his figures (or plants) dissipates into the distance in a veil of haze. […]The pictorial space becomes so intensely visionary that the sporadic lifting of figures causes no sense of dissonance; already weightless, almost massless, the beings persist in a state of flight and suspension.” Bringing our inquiries and intellectual excursions to a premature close, one might conclude that the pictorial art of Tamás Kárpáti, changing only through minor shifts over the passage of time and decades, is, in a paradoxical (and ultimately self-evident) manner, a painting of the elusiveness and unrepresentability of things. It may be concluded, albeit prematurely, that Tamás Kárpáti’s painting, changing only through minor shifts over decades, is a paradoxical yet ultimately self-evident art concerned with the elusiveness and unrepresentability of things. The apprehension of the unapprehendable. Everything is fleeting, everything dissolves and slips into uncertainty, and even when something seems to take shape by chance, it emerges only dimly as a lurking, visionary apparition, filtered through the obscurity of memory and the haze of the past, becoming buoyant or aerial, drifting within the never-subsiding waves of flux. It is as though, in the next moment, figures and landscapes were to sink back into the undulating currents of colour and dissolving patches, as though they were to dissolve before visual apprehension could be completed. Within this peculiar pictorial universe, intuitive certainties, if such things exist at all, are repeatedly called into question by a doubt that vainly seeks the essence of things, cloaked in painterly density, yet one that at the same time opens a gate, clearing a path for the boundless possibilities of experience and empathetic immersion.
Analysts of his art (the art writer György Csapó and the art historian Ernő P. Szabó) point out that the painting of Tamás Kárpáti can be divided into distinct phases. In the introduction to the catalogue of his solo exhibition held in 1993 at the Vigadó Gallery, Ernő P. Szabó delineates the phases of Kárpáti’s oeuvre and outlines the motifs characteristic of each phase: “When surveying the successive sequence of paintings and groups of works, the transformations of Kárpáti’s art naturally cannot escape notice. The artistic career spanning nearly two decades may be divided into four major periods. The first few years constituted the Rococo phase, initially defined by the experience of landscape and later by lyrical moods articulated through the relationship between figure and landscape. During this period, the paintings of Watteau, the poetry of Csokonai, as well as the works of Proust, Gyula Krúdy, and Lajos Gulácsy exerted a formative influence on Kárpáti; lyricism, decorativeness, musicality, a wry restraint, and irony characterised his paintings of this phase, constructed from greenish and luminous yellow hues.” The gradually transforming painting of this phase is exemplified by Csokonai, Török temető (Csokonai, Turkish Cemetery, 1977), and Kis búza (Little Wheat, 1976), where the human figure increasingly assumes the central role (Csokonai tájban [Csokonai in a Landscape, 1979], Költő és katonák [Poet and Soldiers, 1979], Üdvözítők [Saviours, 1979], Szenvedély [Passion, 1978]). Painted at the end of the 1970s, in A falnál (By the Wall), landscape motifs appear only in a reduced portion of the pictorial field; the figure turned towards the wall, covering its ears and leaning forward, is now left alone with its memories and pains. This development leads directly to the deep browns and glowing yellows of the Példázatok I–XXX. (Parables I–XXX) series. It is as though individual moments of Christ’s Passion were to surface on these panels, the prayer, the arrest, and the scenes of torment, without any of the paintings allowing for the precise identification of a particular passage from the Gospels. In the next phase, in the years following 1982-83, the mood of Kárpáti’s paintings once again becomes more lyrical, while the dramatic tension subsides. However, the playful, idyllic elements of his first period do not return. Elements of the background that had previously lacked clearly defined motifs regain a more concrete form, appearing at times as Gothic architectural details (Szomjasok oltára [Altar of the Thirsty, 1985], Képmutogatók oltára [Altar of the Cantastoria, 1986]), and at other times, as motifs recalling landscape details from early Renaissance painting (Alázat kövek előtt [Humility In Front of Stones, 1987], Vízöntő [Aquarius, 1986], Szelídek [The Meek, 1986]). […] In the most recent years, the object, the landscape background composed of identifiable motifs, once again disappears, and only the figure, or more frequently isolated details of the human head, appears against backgrounds rich in tonal and chromatic nuance, formed through translucent, glazed passages. Even the austere figures of the Parables are further simplified: the figure is reduced to a single leg, a fragment of the torso, or a head rendered with only a single eye, while the swirling forms of the background may be read as cloud motifs. Towards the end of the decade and in the early 1990s, the dominant greenish tonalities of the mid-1980s are replaced by brownish-reddish surfaces (Salome, 1992; Szent Flórián [Saint Florian, 1991]), followed by the predominance of greys and greyish-green hues (Tövis [Thorn, 1992], Szent Lőrinc mennybemenetele [The Ascension of Saint Lawrence, 1992]), a continuing shift that could be observed at the exhibition held in 1992 at the Christian Museum in Esztergom. Changes and alternations in subject matter and motifs, as well as subtle modifications in painterly articulation, remain traceable in the years that follow; yet the essential features, above all the determining dominance of colour and colourism among the means of expression, the use of glazing, and the suggestive evocation of figures and forms, have remained a constant throughout his entire oeuvre, from the beginnings to the present day. This is also noted by Ernő P. Szabó in his reflection written on the occasion of Kárpáti’s exhibition held in Tihany in 2003: “On the one hand, the works of the past eighteen months point to an increase in scale (Jézus megkísértései [The Temptations of Jesus], Sanctus), and, on the other, to a strengthening of abstraction, since several works, for example Menekülés Egyiptomba (Flight Into Egypt) and Menekülő Diana (The Fleeing Diana), present scarcely any concrete detail of the events depicted. Instead, they allude to them, relying on the viewer’s imagination to invoke biblical narratives and, in recent years with growing emphasis, episodes drawn from Greco-Roman mythology. But above all, one can observe a further enrichment of the chromatic world, already highly complex, constructed from interlinked tonalities in a manner comparable to musical compositions: the swirling interplay of warm reds, ochres, and browns, and of lighter hues, dissolving into one another and into the totality of the universe.” In 1978, Bálint Chikán, one of the first commentators on Tamás Kárpáti’s art, noted in his study published in the journal Művészet that colours, through sensitively nuanced and finely held tonal relationships, constitute a unifying characteristic of his oeuvre and determine the fundamental mood of the compositions. “There are no sharp contrasts in his paintings, nor do individual works set warm and cool colours in opposition.” Chikán further elaborates this observation in relation to colour: “Tamás Kárpáti builds his compositions largely on warm colours (oranges, ochres, yellows, and reds), and these light, warm hues clearly indicate an intention to express serene emotions, joy, tenderness, and optimism. The restraint and nuance of the colour scale find their counterpart in an emotional world marked by economy of means, quietness, and sensitivity.” Although his colour scale later underwent significant change, from the 1980s onwards darker tonalities appeared, and the cool green already favoured earlier assumed an increasingly prominent role, the mode of pictorial articulation remained essentially unchanged. A precise account of the defining characteristics of this manner of painting, rooted in glazing technique, is likewise provided by Ernő P. Szabó in the catalogue introduction cited above: “Just as persistently as he seeks what it is that only his own paintings are capable of expressing, so consistently does he construct his works, building up five or six, often even more, layers by means of glazing. Before beginning to paint, or more precisely before preparing the canvas or wooden panel, he produces many preparatory drawings, and only once a version appears definitive does he take up the brush. ‘If it is drawn well, a single line, or even a single point, can encapsulate an entire day, or the whole world’, he says of his drawings, and this statement applies with even greater force to the layered interplay of translucent colours. Owing to the glazing technique and the underpainting with different colours, Kárpáti’s painting is characterised by an infinite richness of tonal nuance, and it is through the modulation of these nuances that shifts in his emotional register are articulated, along with the internal logic and phenomenology of the drama articulated within the paintings.”
It may be asked what all this signifies in the first decade of the third millennium, given a painterly outlook and a vision of the world shaped by the spirit of the age, and sustained by artistic intentions refined and confirmed over several decades of practice. In the catalogue accompanying a Budapest exhibition of Kárpáti’s work, the art historian Magdolna Supka wrote that “the oeuvre as a whole constitutes a single beautiful metaphor”. With regard to the nature of this metaphor, one may suggest that within the fragmented planes and unbounded, Intuited spaces of reality constituted by appearances, evoked by Tamás Kárpáti, it is the human and nature, God and nature, and God and divine nature that appear as a face, a bodily form, a tree, a branch, a bush, a crucifix, or merely as a shadow, imprint, or faint idea, in the persistent twilight of a constant dusk, emerging from the transitions of tone between glowing reds, soft ochres and oranges, vertiginously deep greens, and browns that resolutely withstand menacing blacks. Burdened with historical allusions and with mythic and symbolic resonances, laden with the meanings of the deeply distant past, these works convey their messages and emotions through a surge of heavy feelings and subtle inner sensibilities. However, the sources of the fragile beauty and the persistent sense of longing and displacement in Kárpáti’s paintings should be confronted not with the past but with the present: set against life itself, our own existence marked by continual crises, these works bring parallels and contrasts into sharp focus and crystallise insights that compel decision.
Rather than engaging in speculative constructions, interpretations deemed arbitrary or logical, or iconographic parallels and correspondences, it is more appropriate to state simply that every painting created by Tamás Kárpáti constitutes yet another strange, inexplicable, and enigmatic wonder. This painterly world, playing with intimations and transience, flickering with the reflexes of the miraculous, invites a reassessment of our preconceptions: in the light of this painting, of these works, it may be affirmed that the painful astonishment of sacrifice, the devotion of silence, the transfiguration of faith, the pathos of vocation, and the turbulence of the soul can find pictorial articulation. And within this sublime elevation, the painfully beautiful images of substance exert such an attraction, bind the viewer so powerfully, that they ultimately liberate: they endow the beholder with a kind of expansive inner freedom.
[2013]