Dóra Keresztes painter and graphic artist, animation film director, illustrator

Dóra Keresztes is a versatile artist: a graphic designer, illustrator of children’s and adult literature, painter, poster and set designer, director of animated films, an artist capable of continual renewal while remaining consistently true to herself. Although book illustration forms the central axis of her career, her practice ranges widely, from postage stamps to posters, from theatrical set design to animated film, and from painting to embroidery. The diversity of her art is perhaps best conveyed by the words of Benedek Kiss: “Dóra Keresztes works with pencil, pen, and brush, and she has explored the aesthetic potential of embroidered textiles. Each of her works is different. She has a stylised, carefully formed visual world characterised by a wide-eyed, enduringly childlike sense of wonder. This is a form of naivety that knows and understands its antecedents and the modern schools, yet speaks in its own voice, and, despite its pronounced decorativeness, it remains authentic, grounded in depth of content. The antecedents of her work reach back from disciplined miniatures and mosaics to cave drawings flashing with surreal visions.”

Already during her secondary-school and college years, she was exposed to a wide range of influences, from which her individual artistic world gradually crystallised over the course of several years. At the Vocational Secondary School for Visual Arts commonly known as the Kisképző, she acquired a solid foundation in filmmaking and animation under the guidance of Marcell Jankovics. During the same period, at the Derkovits Circle, her mentor was the abstract expressionist painter Árpád Szabados. During a secondary-school study trip to Transylvania, she was profoundly influenced by the painted panelled ceilings of Reformed wooden churches. As she herself noted in her inaugural academic lecture: “Art history tends to subsume these painted panelled ceilings under the label ‘peasant Baroque’, although they are far more than that. In the sixteenth century, the motifs of ancient astral lore once again appeared on the ceilings of Reformed churches, and each painted panel conveys hidden and broader cosmic relationships.” In addition to this ancient belief system, these images also draw on another source: the floral ornaments of Ottoman carpets, which inspired the ladies of Renaissance aristocratic courts and courtly households, who embroidered pomegranates, carnations, tulips, and peonies onto church altar cloths intended as pious gifts. This folk culture, characterised by a dual formal vocabulary, has been transmitted as an underground current, remaining alive to this day, with the result that the rich repository of motifs of this ‘peasant’ Renaissance and Baroque tradition could serve as a source of inspiration for Dóra Keresztes.

At the Book Illustration and Design programme of College of Applied Arts (now: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design), her teachers included György Haiman, János Kass, and Ernő Rubik. Of these teachers, János Kass had the most decisive influence on her. She graduated from his class, and he continued to follow the career of his much-esteemed former student in later years. In his article A kitárt pávaszárnyak – Keresztes Dóra beérkezése (lit. The Spread Peacock Feathers – The Artistic Coming-of-Age of Dóra Keresztes), published in the literary journal Alföld, János Kass recalls his student’s distinctive worldview and imaginative richness, already evident during her college years, in the following terms: “How much strength, determination, and joy of life in a single person; how many explosive ideas. What an urge to act courses through her, like a fairytale oven in which the loaves bake to a rich, golden brown. The artist, whose quick reflexes we had already noticed at the college, keeps pace with the times, but folk tales and folk art permeate her oeuvre as well; the spirit of the tales pervades her entire being. Her wry and often ironic reflexes, like a gyroscope, keep her from straying from the chosen path, and folk art lends flavour to, yet never overwhelms, her personality and style.”

Inspired by János Erdélyi, from this multiplicity of impulses and motivating forces, Dóra Keresztes’s ars poetica was articulated as follows: “To be a bridge between Europe and Asia, or, rather, a landmass connected to both.” For alongside Hungarian folk art, stylistic features drawn from the art of other peoples, for example, influences from the Ural region, or from Celtic and Nordic traditions, can likewise be discerned in many of Keresztes’s works. The frequent interweaving of Hungarian and universal folklore is natural, since many motifs, symbols, and formal solutions recur, or appear in closely related forms, in different parts of the world. “Her relationship to these cultures is not formal but essential, since for Dóra Keresztes, the unfolding and visual articulation of ancient, concealed metaphysical knowledge is only possible through pictorial metaphors and visual associations.”

“At the same time, in the case of several of Dóra Keresztes’s works, it may already seem somewhat odd to mention the influence of folk art, as her work no longer relies on the representation of concrete motifs. What remains are the formal simplification, the mode of stylisation, the use of pure decorative surfaces, the contrast of colours, the construction of the composition, the use of symmetries, the preference for planar representation, and an affinity for geometry, all of which derive from the study of folk art and return throughout her oeuvre as a form of meaningful continuity.” As an example, one may cite her four-part linocut series entitled Piktográfia (Pictography), completed in 1985.

However, folk art is only one of the sources of inspiration shaping Dóra Keresztes’s visual world. It is reasonable to concur with Sándor Békési, who identified the influence of three major sources in her art: “...the first derives from Western European, awkward woodcut prints and the pages of folk-magical csíziós [a traditional Hungarian astrological almanac, widely circulated from the early modern period onward, combining calendrical information with astrological, medical, prognostic, and folk-magical knowledge, often accompanied by woodcut illustrations], still evocative of the Middle Ages. While the grotesque, a defining feature of this graphic world, originates in the grottos and sealed caverns of the decorative, mystical alchemical workshops, from whose hearths Dóra Keresztes has pilfered fuel enough to sustain her own oil lamp through many winter evenings.

Another source consists in the figures populating the painted ceiling panels of Csenger, Szenna, and Crasna (Kraszna), ranging from the sun- and moon-faced beings to the two-tailed mermaids and unicorns. Painted with the worn brushes of humble carpenters in fresh, saturated colours, these are Edenic gardens and archaic folk visions, bearing traces of a ‘peasant’ Decameron.

Finally, the third source, perhaps unconsciously, lies in Marc Chagall: in his floating angels, goats, and fiddlers poised on rooftops, as well as in the wedding couple fused in their nuptial kiss and the essential rooster set against the star-filled sky.”

The outset of her career was shaped in an almost fateful manner by the fact that her very first illustration commission, Paraszt Dekameron (Peasant Decameron), written by Olga Nagy and published in 1977, achieved immediate and resounding success. The visual idiom of Dóra Keresztes became so closely identified with this book that she was invited to provide the illustrations for the sequel, issued in 1983 under the title Újabb paraszt Dekameron (lit. Another Peasant Decameron). These archaic, apocryphal folk texts are permeated by humour and absurdity, and they are at once grotesque and ballad-like. Through her stylised engravings, Keresztes is able to convey this bittersweet world in such a way that, behind the coarse jokes, the reader senses the genuine drama of existence, equally profane and sacred. Their fairytale surrealism affords ample scope for grotesque contortions, piquant eroticism, and more robust modes of visual articulation. A world comes into being in which human and animal, sun and moon, imagination and reality, nature and cosmos merge into one. Quoting the ethnographer Zsuzsanna Erdélyi: “The world of Dóra Keresztes is no less absurd than it is real, and no less profane than it is sacred. It startles and even provokes. She creates order by overturning order. Her way of seeing renders what it touches beautiful. She casts a sideways glance with impish audacity. She displays sacrilegious images with mischievous complicity. She confounds temporal layers, allowing the present to flash up within a two-thousand-year-old past, and vice versa, for she continually reactivates the past in the present.”

Her favoured technique already made its appearance in Peasant Dekameron, that is relief printing, specifically linocuts, black-and-white or hand-coloured, occasionally printed from multiple blocks, evoking the world of medieval woodcuts. Her use of colour is characterised by strong, pure hues applied almost unmixed (yellow, green, blue, red, orange, and purple), whose combined effect is capable of conjuring the fairytale-like, mystical radiance of medieval stained-glass windows for the viewer. As Ágnes Gyetvai observes: “Their antecedents lie in the world of the Biblia pauperum, the pages of folk-magical csízió almanacs, but above all in playing cards, often referred to in the local popular tradition as the ‘Devil’s Bible’, which were later revitalised by the expressionist book illustration and design of the 1920s.” From this strand of her oeuvre, alongside Peasant Dekameron, special attention should be given to her illustrations for Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, as well as for the ballads of François Villon based on the freely adapted versions created by György Faludy. Her linocuts created for the medieval French poet’s danse macabre cycle may likewise evoke the visual world of the Dance of Death series by the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger.

The world of the ancient Hungarian belief system, the vajákos incantations [vajákos is a figure in Hungarian folk culture engaged in folk healing, divination, and other superstitious or quasi-magical practices], regös chants [regős is a traditional Hungarian ritual singer and storyteller associated with archaic chants, linked to pre-Christian mythic and seasonal rites], magical naïve folk religiosity, superstitions, and myths, also exerts a profound influence on Dóra Keresztes’s art. Among her favourite recurring figures are the lúdvérc [a Hungarian folk demon or familiar spirit, linked to magic and erotic possession], the dragon, and the griffin. The flying, billowing lúdvérc of her blue-and-black linocut, a lidérc [a Hungarian folk demon or familiar spirit causing nightmares and magical affliction] hatched from the egg of a black hen, might be read as a visual counterpart to the witches of one of her favourite poets, Anna Kiss, who take on bird form and fly around in her poems. Quoting Gabriella Kernács: “According to ancient Hungarian belief, the lúdvérc, or lidérc, also known as Lilik, is the lover and helper of the táltos [a Hungarian folk shaman endowed with innate supernatural powers]. If it takes up residence in a household, it assumes the form of a woman if its host is a man, and transforms into a man if its mistress is a woman. It may be flame, it may be a bird, or it may have goose’s feet.” While in Hungarian folktales the dragon is more often an obstacle to be overcome by the hero, in Chinese culture, as once among the Hungarians of the Conquest period, it is a symbol of power. “The ancient images of yin and yang were originally the entwining of the red and blue dragons, the sacred unions of fire and water as primordial elements, from which life came into being.” In China dragons are therefore regarded as the lords of seas, lakes, and rivers, as vassals of the Jade Emperor. “Yet dragons are also the lords of fire and the guardians of spiritual treasures; serving as a gateway to the celestial realm.” The abstract blue and red swirling forms of her Panta rhei painting series may therefore be interpreted as simplified versions of these mythic dragon motifs, or as the struggle between water and fire, as György Szemadám has pointed out: “At first glance, employing the familiar designation of the 1960s and 1970s, these are so-called abstract works; yet behind the pliant, swirling forms, intimations of sea waves, fish, and other aquatic creatures come into view. In these seven paintings, in a distinctive manner, Dóra Keresztes articulates the essence of the element of water, of that primordial element whose very nature is circulation, since the love of water for the ‘celestial fire’, the Sun, draws it upward, then in the form of rain, the ‘celestial waters’ fall back upon the earth awaiting fertilisation.” “The griffin, as the ancient archetype of the bird symbol, serves as a support for the connection between Heaven and Earth. It is a bearer of the Milky Way in place of the Golden Bridge lost in primordial times. According to archaic myths, the gods often assumed avian form. This is attested by temple paintings, reliefs, and sculptures found in the early centres of human civilisation, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, China, and India. Hungarian folk tradition likewise abounds in depictions that show half bird, half human figures. One such exceptional relief is the Bird Maiden concealed within the wall of the monastery at Mănăstireni (Magyargyerőmonostor). The same motif appears in the ancient origin myth of the Hungarians, the union of Emese with the Turul [a mythological bird of prey, mostly depicted as a falcon, in Hungarian tradition and Turkic tradition, and a national symbol of Hungarians], in which the cosmic being, as a Bird of Fate, fertilises the ancestress who dreams the future.”

As a maker of animated films, she follows the same path as in her work as an illustrator. Among her films, it is her second work, Garabonciák (1985) (lit. Garanboncias [garabonciás: a character in Hungarian mythology, a type of sorcerer or itinerant charlatan endowed with diabolical powers, among them the ability to conjure storms]), that most clearly reflects her intellectual horizon and distinctive visual philosophy, whose essence may be summed up as the conviction that artistic freedom can be fully realised only through fairytale surrealism and unrestrained play. The film’s magical visual world, built upon continuous transitions, already anticipates the animation technique of ‘morphosis’ that would later be brought to full fruition in De profundis. The intertransforming forms, stylised metamorphoses, and swirling circular movements have their roots in folk culture, in tradition, which can lead the human being, viewer and creator alike, back to the self. Her work engages not only imagery but also movement and colour. As Aladár Szilágyi has observed, the ‘basic trick’ of her colour animated films is the bold pairing of cooler and warmer hues, a feature that is present in this film as well. The film is complemented by the music of the music group Vízöntő, composed by Károly Cserepes, who proved so attuned to her graphics and the film’s swirling world of movement that the music pulsates in unison with the images. The film’s success is further attested by the fact that it is frequently used as a profile film to present the artist’s oeuvre.

Children’s books play a particularly significant role in Dóra Keresztes’s work as an illustrator. In this respect, she shares the conviction of Zoltán Kodály: “Culture cannot be inherited. The culture of our predecessors quickly evaporates if each generation does not make it its own anew.” Through her illustrations, most of which were created for Hungarian folktales and folktales of other peoples, she seeks to serve this process of reinterpretation. The task of visual imagination can be no less than to create a visual world of childlike purity and cheer, capable of addressing the viewer at a deeply personal level. The task is to imagine a fairytale-like, wondrous kaleidoscope for these books. For teaching can only fulfil its purpose when it unfolds magically, through unrestrained play. The sinuous, dynamic lines, together with the whirling decorative blocks of colour, readily lend themselves to a spirit of carefree visual play. Quoting Lajos Lóska: “In this world, human and animal, imagination and reality, nature and cosmos merge into one: witches circle, spin, and fly together with the moon and the stars. This unity is also suggested by the composition, through its cohesion, its space that gestures towards infinity, and the playfulness that is intrinsic to fairy tales.” A similar view is expressed by Judit Jóry with regard to the world of Dóra Keresztes’s fairy-tale illustrations: “Her work is folk-inspired poetry, poetic drawing… The cavalcade of figures is fairytale-like, wondrous. Every movement and curve is acrobatic and playful, with a distinctly circusesque quality … Her enchanted pencil transports us into an enchanted world… Since fairy tales, folk poetry, literature, and poetry, much like the visual arts, depart from reality and take shape within the realm of fiction, legend, and dream.” Finally, it is worth citing Benedek Kiss, who captures the essence of Dóra Keresztes’s wry, grotesque, childlike way of seeing: “She does not favour sharp-edged ‘precise’ drawings, nor ‘beautiful princesses’. What she possesses is something far truer and more primordial: the preservation of a childlike disposition into adulthood.”

Alongside her folk-art-inspired works, Dóra Keresztes has entered into dialogue with the writings of numerous contemporary Hungarian poets over the years, to name but a few: Sándor Weöres, István Kormos, Domokos Szilágyi, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, József Ratkó, Ferenc Buda, Sándor Kányádi, Benedek Kiss, Gáspár Nagy, and Anna Kiss. Capturing the essence of her working method, Gáspár Nagy observed: “Dóra Keresztes is capable of creating a world even by aligning herself with living and deceased poets, by illustrating their books and by seeking out the diamond axis that can be brought to light in their poems or verse tales.” In illustrating literary works, alongside a faithful rendering of the text’s thematic and emotional depth, she strives to remain independent as an image-maker. As Benedek Kiss aptly put it: “Dóra Keresztes never merely illustrates. She creates an autonomous visual world for the books without placing herself before the writer.” It is precisely this capacity that enables her, as an equal creative partner, to bring the poets’ worlds closer to their readers.

If one poet were to be singled out, it would be Anna Kiss whose poetry stands closest to her. This spiritual affinity is by no means one-sided, as is most clearly demonstrated by the poem, A kép-író dicsérete (lit. In Praise of the Image-Writer), which seeks to grasp the essence of Dóra Keresztes’s art: “Somewhere it alludes to Borgesian lines / on the nature of the universe / according to which it has: / ‘neither obverse nor reverse / nor outer wall nor secret center’. / A terrible labyrinth / without exit, endlessly branching. / And this is what works by Dóra Keresztes / allude to, yet it seems that / what is lived through in them / is not the Borgesian initiatory terror / but the freedom of those / who have passed beyond it.”

Sándor Weöres is another poet who is especially close to Dóra Keresztes. His poetry suggests to her the euphoria of becoming one with the whole. In her illustrations for the works of Weöres, word and image resonate with one another within a mode of fairytale surrealism. Her most complex theatrical work is connected to Weöres’s poetic drama, Holdbeli csónakos (lit. The Lunar Boatman), staged at the National Theatre in 2003. On this occasion, she was responsible not only for the poster of the production but was also entrusted with the overall visual design of the stage realisation. Conceived as a genuinely interdisciplinary task, Keresztes designed the sets, costumes, and puppets, as well as the animated interludes linking the individual scenes.

For Dóra Keresztes, religious faith also signifies a deeply personal statement of faith that accompanies her throughout her career. A key early example of her works of sacral art is Budakeszi korpusz (lit. Budakeszi Corpus) (1991), which, through its solutions that combine the former traditions of roadside crucifixes made of thin metal sheet, found at village boundaries, with a modern worldview in a distinctly individual voice, quickly became a place of pilgrimage, until it was destroyed by acts of vandalism. In Budakeszi, she also created the decorative elements for the Reformed church erected in commemoration of Hungarians living beyond Hungary’s borders, consecrated in 1999: the relief-carved coffered motifs of the wooden flooring, as well as the designs for the Lord’s Table cloth and the festive hanging, the pulpit, and the so-called Moses bench, drawing on the formal repertoire of folk embroidery. In a number of paintings intended primarily for commemorative stamp designs associated with the two major Christian feasts (Pietà [2012], I-N-R-I [2003], Corpus Christi [2003]), as well as for the covers of folk-music albums by Károly Cserepes, the influence of the naïve art of Moldavian glass icons becomes apparent, where folk religiosity is fused with the simplicity of children’s drawings.

Dóra Keresztes’s animated film Virágnak világa, világnak virága (2017) (lit. World's Light, Flower's Flower) takes its title from a well-known couplet of the Old Hungarian Ómagyar Mária-siralom (Lamentations of Mary). Within its four-minute duration, the film reimagines the story of Christ’s birth. Dedicated to the memory of the kindred spirit Zsuzsanna Erdélyi, a scholar of archaic folk prayers, the surreal visual world of the film evokes the atmosphere of the paintings of Marc Chagall. In a fairytale-like, playful manner, the motifs of the Christmas festive cycle swirl together: lamb, cow, donkey, rooster, the Archangel Gabriel, the Three Magi, Mary with the infant Christ, a pine tree, and the comet. This playful, surreal, Chagall-esque visuality is most characteristic of Keresztes’s fairy-tale illustrations, a continuity underscored by the fact that the animation’s imagery and symbolism had already taken shape as early as 2001, during her illustration of the book Amíg fölragyog a jászol (lit. Until the Manger Begins to Shine) written by Gáspár Nagy.

She feels a close affinity with the world of the psalms of the Reformed Church, which, as the minister of the Reformed Church in Hungary Sándor Békési has put it, “sing of the dramatic events that unfold within the human heart, on the stage where the personal relationship between God and humankind takes shape.” Psalm 130, De profundis… (Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord), which proclaims the doctrine of predestination regarded as a cornerstone of Protestant faith, namely, the acceptance of the fate ordained for humankind by God, and reconciliation with it, served as the inspiration for Dóra Keresztes’s animated film De profundis completed in 2002. These dramatic events unfolding within the human heart are given visual form in the film. “What we see may be an incantation, or perhaps an apocryphal prayer. The compactness of the interlacing, intertwining figures set within rounded, ovoid fields evokes the magic of rock carvings, the mythical power of shaman drums, and the incised talisman-stones of deserts. The forms transforming into one another, the stylised metamorphoses, and the swirling circular movements are rooted in folk culture. Cellular divisions unfold into a living, surging stream of images. It pulses with raw instinct and emotional intensity, shaped by an intellect engaged in the interpretation of dreams. Within an organic, ever-forming, all-encompassing frame, suggestive of a cave opening or a womb, emblematic signs and mythical symbols of the soul and animal life appear, which are reminiscent of the archaic imagery of indigenous peoples.” The essence of the film, created using a distinctive animation technique, ‘morphosis’, lies in the fact that once the visual imagery reaches its peak, it dissolves back into nothingness. The film’s impact is further attested by the fact that following its completion, the animation director and teacher Zsolt Richly taught this animation technique as a separate subject within the applied arts programme at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.

As in the film, the same visual world resurfaces in another religiously themed work produced shortly thereafter: the linocuts created for the book Zsoltár minden időben (lit. A Psalm for All Times) (2004) by Léna Losonczi. In the illustration for Psalm 18:5, “The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me”, the whales chasing one another in the raging waves and tearing into each other appear as late descendants of the fabulous monsters familiar from medieval art, fire-breathing dragons and basilisks.

Among the paintings of Dóra Keresztes, the Panta rhei series completed in 2005 stands out, introducing a strikingly new tonal register into her oeuvre. “The Greek phrase literally means ‘everything flows’ and conveys the idea of the world in perpetual motion.” It is at once a dialectic of opposites, akin to the entwined dragons of the yin and yang symbol. The chromatic structure of the paintings rests on primordial pairs of opposites: red and blue, fire and water, white and black, and life and death. However, the tension of opposites also contains the triadic logic of the continuous cycle of life and nature: the unity of birth, death, and rebirth, as well as the philosophical system grounded in the dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

The paintings’ visual articulation is itself innovative, although it may be regarded as a partial return to early roots. The figurality characteristic of her earlier work here gives way to abstraction. In these images, where water grappling with fire and life struggling against death are rendered through swirling lines, she turns back to the formal language of expressive abstract painting. The expressive atmosphere of the works, built on the basic colours blue, red, black, and white, may evoke one of the most renowned series by her mentor, János Kass, namely, his drawings created for A kékszakállú herceg vára (Bluebeard’s Castle). It is the vibrating pulse and powerful dynamism of Bartók’s music, reaching beyond tonality, that binds the works of the older artist and his former student.

As a summation of Dóra Keresztes’s career to date, the volume Virágnak világa, világnak virága (lit. World's Light, Flower's Flower) was published in 2021, edited, graphically designed, and produced by the graphic artist and book designer László Rostoka. Its title refers to the animated film of the same name released in 2017 and discussed earlier. The book’s motto is a quotation from Marc Chagall that succinctly expresses Dóra Keresztes’s own artistic credo: “When I work from the heart, almost everything succeeds; when I work from the head, almost nothing does.” When one surveys her oeuvre, spanning a wide range of styles and genres, the aptness of this statement becomes clear. Her art, like Marc Chagall’s, springs from the heart.

[2022]