Writer, cultural historian, photographer? Decipherer of poems and melodies, keeper of folk art treasures? A wanderer of landscapes – especially the Carpathian Basin – a recorder of faces, holidays, encounters, churches, haystacks, gables, wells, and holy images? He is all of them in one. Zoltán Móser is a veritable institution. Moreover, he has such a vibrant and explaining observer, who sees behind the singular image, the captured characteristic moment, and is able to display the past – and perhaps the most important cogs driving the engine of the present – with such vast cultural-historical knowledge that the entire mosaic of beauty and knowledge assembles into an enviable panorama.
The Móser photograph is simultaneously a work of fine art and the embodiment of a distinctive way of thinking. From Balázs Orbán to the circle of Kassák and the socio-photo movement of Lajos Lengyel, hundreds have tried to transfer visually tangible reality onto their lenses and to the film of their little box cameras – sometimes out of love for the landscape, sometimes to document poverty. The documentary value of their recordings is undeniable. Even that which appeared as a “dream” in their black-and-white patches was aimed – perhaps from pragmatic perspectives? – at reality. Beauty was almost outside the structure.
Móser, in contrast to so many classics, is a veritable dreamer of beauty – the economical dynamism that dominates the structure. Even in his object photographs and street scenes, there is departure from tradition – from the traditional setting. His self-expressive collection of beauty does not merely intend to document what is seen – from the perspective of a museum, even the ugly is practically beautiful – but to conquer it by incorporating his own emotional world in such a way that this “engulfment” reaches the viewer.
Note that, ultimately, in this aesthetic adventure, straight lines and curves, uniqueness and parallels, the familiar and the alien play just as important a role as the contrast that typically results from them, as different pictorial elements and motifs are shaped into a taut structure. When the photographic artist has – temporarily? – left behind the world of black-and-white, he has rowed into a bay where the richness of colour combinations – alongside strict structure, of course – almost drives the boat.
And this boat, as Italy and the United Kingdom have become accessible to roam, hit the sea. Alongside the familiar landscapes and cultural-historical rarities of Transylvania, the Highlands, and the Southern Lands, etc., which he has circled a thousand times, the breathing cathedrals and house walls of Bologna and London – monuments showing historical time with almost clockwork precision – provide subjects for the photos.
It is extraordinary how the couleur locale, the local colour, suddenly transforms into the universal, while preserving local value.
Noszvaj (a white-walled house) possesses such purity that it holds its own beside Bologna (the Renaissance windows of a palace). And no less faith is found in the ruined church of Zsámbék, though time has taken its toll, than in the cathedral of the Archbishopric of Canterbury. These beauties, wholes extracted from fragments – cropping is important! – illustrate something of the richness of a multifaceted Europe. Regardless of whether the contrast is smaller or greater, parallelism is the decisive factor.
Taking advantage of the benefits of vertical construction, the silhouette of the gleaming wooden houses of Porvoo in Finland is expanded through the beautiful coffered church of Szenna – the supporting structure is domestic! The aforementioned Finnish natural wonder – with its life-giving, biblically symbolic water – finds a kindred world in the pipes of a brick-walled façade section in London.
In terms of image structure, although the photographs collide – the evocation of the organic landscape is contrasted by a constructive design, with shining geometrically ordered serenity – the near (symbol and sign system) and distant (geographical location) worlds meet somewhere in infinity. Europe's “symphonies of colour”, with their richness and layering, with their multitude of encounters, friendly exchanges, and intercultural dialogues – where here your hear the kettledrum, there the cello or the trombone – provide a pictorial realisation of a creatable (half-finished?) system based on mutual esteem, in which, beyond the centuries (of morality and a culture of conduct), all forms of humanism and education are included. Móser's photo-symbols are certainly suggestive of this: the majesty of an alliance-friendship, based on interdependence and mutual respect. (The towers uniting in some kind of sacred “superiority” – Sighișoara and San Gimignano; Ghent and Ohrid – are also examples of this elevation.)
In the exhibition, in addition to the dual-element photographs – without location indicators – we receive such an astonishing wealth of imagery (painterliness?) that countless modalities of the figurative and abstract are laid out before us in abundance. The harmonious window-organ pipes of a palace in Saint Petersburg, the solitude of a red fire hydrant standing alone on brick pavement (Poland – Toruń), the sitting figure of a wanderer resting in a desert of stairs (Paris), and the human figure of a masterfully carved porch fence (Transylvania – Cârța) are all eloquent motif-chains revealing waves of emotion, or motifs effective even in their uniqueness, in which the different object and behavioural cultures of different regions are also fixed.
Zoltán Móser's mediating role lies in his ability to demonstrate in these formations of beauty all the humanity – primarily by uniting the living and the dead in a dazzle pouring forth a multitude of variations – which is the cornerstone of universal culture. One incredibly beautiful piece – can a lens serve as a brush? – is the photo composed in memory of Kelemen Mikes (a tree shining with its shaggy head in a large, banded green field – Perkő); associated with this mysticism of the landscape is an image radiating the tranquillity of Tevel, the photographer's native village.
And the almost non-figurative compositions – the graffiti in Vienna, the clump of grass functioning as a Harghita memorial, the wall dedicated to the memory of Dezső Korniss evoking one of his painting methods, the drip (Miercurea Ciuc), and the brown spots and crevices cut with God's own knife into the green of the Kászon Basin (Bágy) – also have a magic to them. But in this genre, the masterpiece is the composition accidentally assembled on the ground and asphalt of the Bicske railway station, reminiscent of Tachisme. (Another outstanding piece, for its inscrutability, is the photo of cresting white waves swimming into blue, holding them up almost as a pedestal.)
When a photographic artist walks in the footsteps of their beloved classics – Taormina evokes Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, the “deep-sounding” image of Bihar recalls Béla Bartók –, they are aware that the composition of landscape, culture, and man is a force inspiring creation. They capture a moment waiting (longing!) to be recorded from the universal – from the pot of order and the basin of chaos – in order to engrave into us (whether in a representational or abstract way) the photographic countenance of beauty that makes us all happy. His message? Good composition is a power capable of practically defeating the weapons of the world.
[2017]