Building on his increasingly intense drawing practice during his high school years – driven primarily by his reading experiences and his growing ambition to illustrate – Péter Kovács applied to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1961. In 1962, the few weeks of study he spent at the Dési Huber István Art Circle, along with the craft techniques he learned from Jenő Barcsay’s anatomy book, were only sufficient to gain him admission to the evening preparatory course. Then, in 1964, he was admitted to the full-time program. As a student of Géza Fónyi, he began his training in the painting department, and although at first, he wanted to transfer to the graphics department, he ultimately remained a painter. Early on, he was fascinated by Rembrandt and Goya alongside Béla Kondor, and later by Rouault, whom he discovered together with Zoltán Tölg-Molnár. His career began with a series of panel paintings executed in plextol.
Even during his academy years, Kovács was preoccupied with the problem of synthesizing classical values and modernity. For him, the possibility of such a synthesis was demonstrated by Béla Kondor’s art – professionally impeccable, grounded in firm ethical foundations, and reinterpreting symbols in a deeply personal way. A decisive experience for him was his encounter with Kondor’s works at the exhibitions of the 1960s, as well as his personal meeting with the artist, whom he visited in his studio together with Imre Szemethy. These meetings reinforced his conviction that one should appear before the public only with deeply felt, professionally perfect works marked by a distinctly individual stylistic character and refined to technical uniqueness and perfection. In his early career, Kovács created confident, expressive compositions of seated and reclining figures captured in confined, tightly framed spaces, painted with plextol. Alongside this, he drew continuously and produced illustrations commissioned by Móra Publishing House. He sold works – essentially studies for paintings he later intended to execute on a larger scale – through the Képcsarnok Company, refusing to make any compromises or concessions to commercial expectations. His financial stability was secured by the Derkovits Scholarship he received in 1971. Many of Kovács’s early compositions – depicting anxious, harried figures – disappeared into the labyrinth of so-called “state purchases”. By the end of the 1970s, his series of plextol panel paintings came to a close. Kovács’s early works belong to that current indicated by a group of predecessors and contemporaries – Tibor Csernus, László Lakner, Lajos Sváby, Ferenc Banga, Aladár Almásy, Imre Szemethy, József Szentgyörgyi – in which the keynote is set by a dramatic tone and a somber voice, and whose atmosphere is permeated by restlessness, agitation, fear, and the foreboding or awareness of tragedy.
This somber, oppressive world unfolded in the works shown at the exhibition held in 1989 at the Vigadó Gallery, and again in the collection presented in the same Budapest venue in 1997. Compared to his earlier creative periods, no major changes or radical turns could be observed: the works of the 1990s likewise testified that Péter Kovács, almost obsessively, kept drawing and painting one and the same subject – the phenomena concentrated on the body, the corpus, containing and reflecting tragically concluded events, fears, and states of horror. In his paintings of the 1990s, nothing remains but the broken human figure – ever more fleeting, ever less recognizable, ever more mutable, increasingly charged with deep ambiguities, and ever more animalistically human. Still, there are no objects, no surroundings, no attributes in the compositions; no space hinting at exactness or illusionism, no dimension, and no orienting horizon – only the stripped, uncertainly standing, lying, suspended, floating body, always and inevitably bent or collapsing. There is no story: the tragedy of a state, a situation synthesized into mere appearance, without any promise of hope, dominates these paintings. This insight was also articulated in 2000 by the painter József Gaál when writing about Kovács’s works: “A Christian vision – martyrs, saints, thieves, and frail human beings rendered in X-ray mannerism, with anatomical convulsions. In the collapsing human figure lie both the silhouette of Christ and the sin of Christian Europe, the final vertigo of every tortured person. Out of the tangled gestures there always emerges a dead point, a delicate balance, when despite the incompleteness, the fulcrum of the two-armed scale between this world and the beyond comes into being. A dead point – or rather a threshold – from here to the other side. At this point, objects can no longer exist; only through the body can we obtain signs. Intermediate existence, bardo – as an Eastern person would say – because the departing yet tranquil soul watches the writhing of illusionary bodies, witnessing the theatre of bodily decay. The figures have no outward gaze; they look within themselves, dissolve into nothingness, displaying the disappearance and erosion of the body. The liberated soul can see only this vaporous image. The fading, weakening line, which turns into a nervous protrusion evoking some body part, cannot prevent dissolution in space, nor the loss of space itself. … Péter Kovács’s path is a solitary one; he is able to transform the projection of his inner world into a true mystery. He has stepped out of the self-centred realm of self-realization; through his descent he brings to the surface universal human problems. His balanced personality is no longer an enigma – for only with such serenity of soul can the presentation of sacrifice be turned into a sign. The path still continues; the figures can never become invisible: seemingly, every sign dissolves into infinity, swallowed by emptiness – yet there always remains a trembling gesture that enfolds within itself the vanishing forms.”
Beyond all these forms of sensuous expression, the driving force and cornerstone of these works is an intense intellectuality: a tragic vision of existence, a philosophical depth that drowns in its own dramas, and which, through the heightened expressivity of calmness itself, captivates and refuses to let the viewer rest. This expressivity derives from Péter Kovács’s enchantingly restrained yet richly complex artistic vocabulary, from the painterly quality of his graphic materials and techniques, from the multifaceted nature of his painterliness, and from a seemingly inexhaustible world of effects. His compositions are variable arenas where the sensitive interplay of line and patch dances between harmony and contrast: the seepages, the blurrings, the dissolutions into nothingness, the almost-imagined contours project before us the ungraspable gradations of mystery. The basic tones are white, grey, yellow, orange, red, and black, within which these same hues drift toward the ultimate dénouement of figuration. Painfully breaking lines, turning back toward their point of departure – or intending to, but unable to do so –, hesitant strokes, swirling tangles of line, traces of shading washed into patches, and smudges: the works take shape and structure from the mystically matured fixations of charcoal, pastel, and coloured pencil. And within the twilight created by these fixations, enclosed by uncertain outlines, appear the remnants of human figures – wrecks of men, wormlike beings – as if in the final phase, in a barely recognizable form.
By the 1980s, Péter Kovács’s works had become not only important and award-winning presences in Hungarian exhibitions, but were increasingly shown abroad as well. His first successful foreign appearance took place in 1983 at the Kunstmesse Basel. Thereafter, his works were regularly presented both in group exhibitions representing contemporary Hungarian art and in solo shows – primarily in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, but also reaching Sweden and overseas, Canada – and they continue to appear internationally today. Fortunate periods of scholarship residencies abroad also intertwined with his career: during the 1980s and 1990s, Kovács worked in Bern, Gröding (Sweden), Rome, and Victoria (Canada). Following these residencies and exhibitions, many of his works remained permanently in the studios or galleries that hosted them; numerous pieces have entered prestigious public and private collections. In addition to the growing body of critical reviews and studies published both in Hungary and abroad, a monograph dedicated to his art appeared in 1998, written by the distinguished art historian Magdolna Supka, renowned for her extensive documentation and analysis of modern Hungarian graphic art. Supka, who fought passionately for Hungary’s forgotten or unjustly neglected masters, followed Kovács’s artistic path with devoted attention until her death in 2005 and authored several studies about his work. In the introductory essay of the Paletta series (published by the T-Art Foundation), she revealed the dimensions of this artistic world in a poetically inspired reflection: “There is, in the dramatic tone of this pictorial art, a kind of dignity and power of utterance that can be compared only to the language of the ode among the genres of poetry. The solemnity of thought and of classical form that characterizes the ode – and makes it appear anachronistic today – is transfigured in Péter Kovács’s art into an expression of restrained passion, whose tension is heightened by the way this artist projects the cruel lessons of his personal fate as the shared burden of humanity, embodying in his nightmarish visions the symbols of the sins committed against humaneness and morality. It is no coincidence that their voice, with the weight of biblical prophecy, proclaims that admonitions and threats are now in vain; and we feel that the brutal realism of these visions – at times surpassing Dante’s Inferno – cuts into the living flesh, evoking a sharp physical pain, as though recalling a freshly torn wound. Since only the unbearable nature of one’s own pain makes the suffering of others simultaneously and equally perceptible to us, this realization compelled the artist to make himself the mediator of these shrieking, whimpering torments. And whoever once fully grasps, in every vibration and twitch, the unsurpassable subtlety of the drawings, the near-distillation of certain forms into nothingness, cannot help but ask: what could have driven this artist to make the unmatchable sensitivity of his line the interpreter of tragedy and agony? Has there ever existed a work of art in which the grotesque and brutal expression of pain coexists on the same plane with aesthetic beauty and high artistic quality?”
From the 1980s onwards, the recurring motifs of “ones”, “twos”, and more rarely “threes” – that is, one-, two-, and three-figure “body quotations” and “face creations” – became fixed in independent sheets, diptychs, and triptychs. The diptychs and triptychs are realized either by placing the sheets of paper bearing the drawings closely side by side, or by mounting them in two or three separate frames – yet these connections are generally not final: the diptych or triptych elements often appear as autonomous works as well, and exchanges between the components of these double or triple ensembles may also occur. In many cases, a larger composition takes form as a drawing that exceeds the borders of the paper, binding several sheets together into a single whole. Alongside these large-scale, multi-sheet works, medium-sized and even palm-sized compositions are also created in Kovács Péter’s studio – works that, though reminiscent of notes or sketches, are nevertheless refined into complete and mature pieces. For larger sheets, the artist often mounts the drawings on canvas, thus transforming their visual impact to evoke that of an oil painting, while the small-scale drawings appear either as independent pieces or as iconostasis-like ensembles. Beyond these formal relationships and characteristics, the works also group themselves into thematic units, loosely bound by recurring motifs or ideas: among them the “cella- és gödörpróba” (“cell and pit test”) series, the “lény-képek” (“creature images”), the “függő-rajzok” (“hanging drawings”), the “penészes” and “rozsdás” (“mouldy” and “rusty”) compositions, and the cycle entitled Arckereső lapok (Face-Searching Sheets).
In addition to the autonomous and serial compositions executed in mixed media, Péter Kovács also produces prints, primarily lithographs – but even here, he employs an individual creative approach: the prints taken from the stone are subsequently altered, transforming them into unique works of art. Such pieces – referred to by the artist as “lithography metamorphoses” (litomets) – were exhibited in 2006 at Galeria IX in Budapest. Moreover, within this creative career spanning over four decades, there exists a continuously evolving applied branch: the field of illustration. Kovács produced illustrations already in his early career – initially as accompanying drawings for stories written for his own children, later on commission for various publishers. Over time, this artistic activity, through harmonious collaborations with writers and publishers, became a sustained and integral part of his oeuvre. Today, this field reveals an astonishingly rich and diverse inventory of works: illustrations and book covers for children’s books, collections of poetry and tales, popular science works, novels, and natural science publications.
Inspired by the great masters of the past – Rembrandt and Goya – and in parallel with the aspirations of the giants of modern art, especially Francis Bacon, Péter Kovács’s art, following in the path of Béla Kondor, occupies a defining place within the powerful Hungarian expressionist current of the 20th and 21st centuries, represented among others by Péter Földi, József Gaál, Károly Kelemen, Károly Klimó, Lajos Sváby, Árpád Szabados, József Szentgyörgyi, Péter Újházi, and András Végh. Through his works, the expressive foundations of a new Hungarian realist art were laid; and upon this solid ground stands one of the most important oeuvres in the history of modern Hungarian art. This life’s work continues to expand today, enriched by ever-new creations that articulate authentic questions and answers to the challenges of our time.
[2013]