The painter András M. Novák is a striking personality of the Hungarian generation of artists that started at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, and has become a decisive artist of today. The artist's career shows that events accelerated and culminated in the last ten years of his career: in the 1990s his works were constantly featured and appeared in contemporary art forums, and his works attracted a lively professional response. It can be accurately recorded that while András M. Novák hardly ever had a solo exhibition until the end of the 1980s, following the introductory exhibitions he held after completing his studies at the college, the 1990s saw a succession of newer and newer exhibitions of his work. It would be obvious to refer to the change of regime in Hungary in 1989-1990 in search of the opposite nuanced origins and motives of the reticence and seclusion, and of the public performance and exposure, but of course we must admit that the connections are not so obvious and direct. There is no doubt that, as a colleague, as a creator of his generation, M. András Novák's painting, or rather the development of his painting in the first two decades, and of course his creative existence, childhood, period of preparation, thought and emotions, artistic existence,- were fundamentally determined by the specific conditions and the scanty, increasingly softening conditions of socialism in Hungary and Central Europe, but still extremely oppressive, shrouded in appearances and unspeakable things, and then his newer period as a painter was marked by the changes and turns of the recent decade, but instead of the circumstances, we should refer to the traversal of a consistent creative path, conscious painterly construction, the maturation and fulfilment of the artist's painting.
In the second half of the 20th century, Hungarian art , in obedience to historical constraints and as a reaction to the unnatural cultural-artistic establishment of the Eastern Bloc, was slow to reflect on modern artistic insights and aspirations, achievements imbued with the spirit of the times. Breaking through what was considered to be the unbreakable art-political and ideological barriers and total isolation, it was only in the second half of the 1960s that a more continuous and vigorous movement along the intellectual-artistic-artistic-artistic front lines of the tradition-avant-garde, Hungarian-European, naturalistic-absolute, often coinciding with the official-independent positions, could be initiated. In these processes, and in history itself, there is a significant role not only for those who radically break with tradition, those who sharply oppose tradition, but also for those who move forward with deliberation, those who build slowly, those who respect classical values, those who wish to renew them, those who strive for synthesis, those who push and stretch conventional frameworks and forms.
M. András Novák's first major exhibition at the Stúdió Gallery in Budapest in 1973 the medium oil tempera panel paintings Rianás (Breaking Ice), Rudesz stégje (Rudesz’s Jetty), Légiparádé (Air Parade), and Hurrá fegyerkezünk (Hooray, We Are Arming Ourselves) all represented the presence of traditional themes, the traditional view and reflection of reality, and the departure from it, the representation of conventions and the intention to transcend them: these works the painter matured into disturbed compositions that still preserved the image of nature, but at the same time transformed it into a passionately expressive shifting of form, deforming it. These works are still strongly connected to the Balaton landscape, which was preserved and reappeared again and again during the following three decades despite the radical changes: the artist's active periods of creative work in the Fonyód studio (which resulted in the so-called Fonyód school, named and registered in connection with the work and collaboration of the seven painters here) and the southern coastal periods, which are still frequent today, explain the recurring painting of the water mirror evocations and reflections, and the recurring painting of the block motif of Badacsony Hill, its stylised or metaphorical composition.
After his debut in the Stúdio Gallery, after ten long, relatively uneventful years, the literature that is supposed to register contemporary art is deeply silent about this period of the painter's career; no reviews or analyses have been published, in 1983 András M. Novák presented his new paintings in his hometown, Somogyi Gallery in Kaposvár. In his review of the exhibition, published in the journal Művészet (Art), Gábor Pogány stated, among others:
“His painting is a strange, dramatic borderline between naturalistic and non-representational art. His highly structured compositions are made even “rougher” by the explosive contrast of colour. He uses colours, burning ochre, permanent green, Parisian blue, brilliant pink that are individually irritatingly unpleasant. But in his paintings, his careful colour compositions cancel out the dissonant effects and blend them into a resounding harmony. The vibrant colours, the fragmented blotchiness, only offend the eye at first, then the view calms down, the pieces fit together, the “puzzle” falls into place. What at first superficial glance we thought was an abstract expressionist colour palette becomes, after a short moment of contemplation, a faithful picture of reality.”
However, in addition to these statements by Gábor Pogány, it is also important to recall that the works exhibited in the Somogyi Gallery have already broken with the pure painting on blackboards: the picture is no longer a representation of a view for the painter, and the viewer, viewed and edited from an external perspective, no longer a homogeneous composition using uniform materials and techniques, but a flat surface that can be freely arranged and incorporated: all that remains of the panel painting is the frame that separates it from its surroundings and marks the boundaries of the work. The artist's thoughts in the catalogue of the exhibition are a poignant reflection on this important change, which laid the foundations for the unravelling of the 1990s: “... I have no style, I have the present and my past days, their deposits, their treasures, the overwhelming abundance of phenomena, which I hope to capture with their unmistakable form, not only in my essentials, but also in their essentials, with the austere work of a bitter pleasure.” Well, the works entitled Nyomot hagyni (Leaving a Trace), Felújítás (Renovation), Nagyvárosi csendélet (Still Life in the Big City), XX. század (20th Century) have already been shaped using collage techniques, building various materials, documents and props into the surface of the image, and somewhat overshadowing the painted details. In the Renovation, a picture of Badacsony, and in the Still Life of the Big City, a village church appears merely as a painted souvenir, as a secondary motif between the creases of the glued paper layers and surfaces, in a strange tension of opposites and unities.
When András M. Novák began to investigate the essence of the carriers and phenomena of everyday life, thus not only dismantled traditional imaging, but also classical methods of image-making: the image was no longer a representation of something, but became the history and document of the image's creation. M. Novák's work, and this is also a testimony to the autonomous method of image-making developed from the 1980s onwards, completed by the use of materials and the ingenious application of collage techniques, is not a mirror or reflection of construction, but rather its opposite, of dismantling: an authentic presentation of something once fully present, a remnant, a fragment, an authentic, richly emotional presentation of something found in its fragmented and symbolic nature. The presentation of personal or personalised material is characterised not by organic connections and precise fittings, but by tangles, destructions, violations: the seemingly random revelation of layers piled on top of each other. It is as if this randomness organizes a painterly order in the cavalcade of corrugated paper, wallpaper, adhesive tape, sandpaper, carpet, tablecloth, furniture upholstery and pieces of hessian. In the painterly world of calm, disciplined squares and rectangles, paper-arch and textile-finish borders, and the latent order of free fields they create, loosely regulated into geometricity, which combine the two modes of expression, using different materials and applying painterly gestures, radiating freedom, the term is even applicable, the chaos controls and organises the aura that concentrates the dynamic forces. Order and disorder, lawful and accidental, irregular and uncertain collide and interconnect in these panels, where all elements seem to be at once frozen in permanence and transitory, playing in whimsy. In the worn and faded, former beauties come to life, in the residual, former intactnesses, and the peeling surfaces confront the viewer with a world of raw surface-altitude. The once harmonious unity based on appearances has disintegrated, the solidity that seemed so confident exists only as a weak skeleton of a dirty surface-covering. The strange fusion of reality and arts in M. Novák's motifs and collage elements of imagery induces ambivalent feelings in the viewer: it is not known whether a wallpaper pattern has become part of the work as an original element of reality or as a painted detail, whether the distress and dirtiness may be real or an artistic effect. The applications of objects and materials, organised into a balanced unity, are not only formal means of enriching the texture and facture of the works, but also means of creating a “layering” of content and thought, which deepen and make the timelines of the work translucent: past and present, sometimes separated, sometimes merging into one, with references and allusions to concrete history and personal fate: look at the ropes and loops, the crosses, the numbers (years!), the letters, the inscriptions, it is a tangled web of intuitions.
In the classification and categorisation system of the avant-garde, the genre and style, the art and aspirations of “arte provera” (poor art) and “combine painting” (assembled picture) are related to András M. Novák's compositions: among his predecessors and contemporaries, the names and art of Mario Merz and Robert Rauschenberg, or the Hungarian László Lakner and Tamás Szentjóby come to mind, which (to highlight just a few important features) incorporate materials that are alien to classical art, incorporate them into the work, and at the same time have an anti-aesthetic appearance, can sometimes be associated with the formal characteristics of abstract expressionism and carry conceptual intentions. András M. Novák paints ugly, very ugly pictures, glues, cuts, assembles, his works seem to have been permanently absorbed by nature, as if they were wrecked by decay and destruction. As if everything in this world had been forgotten. In the scope of these works, things are seen in a different light: perspectives are tilted and surely become unreadable (perhaps the top view, or the wide angle, the long view, is dominant), the ugliness, captured with immense effort, mapped and recorded with a tremendous richness of detail, evokes the poignant beauty of decay and disintegration. Perhaps the last fragments of memories of submerged civilisations shine forth, perhaps the layers of metropolitan existence, empty as hell, are revealed, perhaps the confused visions of overcrowded planes of consciousness appear, perhaps the absurdities of central European existence are arranged into visions laden with pessimism, flickering rebellion and unending despair.
From the 1980s onwards, the medium-sized paintings of the early period were replaced by large-scale panels, and the composition sometimes became a relief, a picture-table. But besides the objects, the evocations of objects, and especially besides the ensembles of objects and fragments of materials, among which paper, which appears in such rich variety in the works of András M. Novák, has been and is still given a special place, the main field of the painter's research work became the surface. The surface, whose omissions and injuries intensely suggest the question: What could be underneath? What can the dirty, self-proclaimed surface cover? Or is the surface the essence? In the process of analysing these questions, the painter has come to the realisation: the essence is the billboard, the poster, the wallpaper, the wall protector. These surfaces or surface substitutes appeared as grotesque-ironic references and became sovereign works in the Öntapi. Humántapéták, festett falvédők, művészi poszterek (Self Wallpapers, Human wallpapers, painted wall protectors, artistic posters), as pieces of the 2000 collection presented to the public: bearing the imprint of intellectual and cultural residue, civilisational insult and visual manipulation, carrying a painful sense of being a waste of space, of being a cultural residue, of being a civilisational insult and of being a visual manipulation. In the second half of the 20th century, the wallpaper, the scattered wall covering was associated in Eastern Europe with heavy symbolic meanings and contents: in the realm of the interchangeability and substitutability of appearance and reality, things were washed together and covered over each other with such ingenuity and enigmatic ingenuity.
In addition to the formulation of painterly statements that can be elevated to the level of generalities, András M. Novák's works from the second half of the 1990s, at the end of the decade, contain concrete, precise visual indications and designations: the painter refers to the history and experience of the recent past. As Ágnes Bakonyvári M. pointed out in her review of the 1998 exhibition at the Újlipótváros Gallery in Budapest: “The furniture fabrics, lace, wallpaper samples, cake wrapping papers evoke the peace and order of bourgeois homes, the sense of order and the holding power they provide for their inhabitants. This is what history has overturned, with its events documented on file papers, newspaper pages, nets, wire fences, crowns of thorns. The historical perspective is transformed into the present with a sudden turn in András M. Novák's Exhumált festmény (Exhumed Painting) or Festménytemető (Painting Cemetery). The blind frame covered with a stained canvas, the creative attempt bound with wire rope, document the inability of materials to become art. The presence of artistic aspirations is confirmed by the inventory label hanging from the wire rope with the stamped inscription Szinyei Merse Pál Társaság or the mailing receipt and inventory label with the artist's postal address and the inscription “Painting Cemetery VIGADÓ Hungary MNA 97”. The composition of the picture entitled Európai úton (On the Road towards Europe), with its acronyms MAK, MNA, MAOE, NKA, tries to make us aware with concrete determination that we shape history and destinies with our actions, words and thoughts, even in the present time of our own personal existence.”
The history of Hungarian art in the recent past is riddled with strange gaps and unexplored areas: important aspirations and valuable works of art lurk in obscurity, hidden in unwritten chapters of reconstructions of the past. One such achievement, little known for its importance, is the painting of András M. Novák, whose first two decades were marked by complete silence and which only gained professional recognition in the 1990s, at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps the reason for this delay is that the place of this picturetour in the complex and multifaceted system of contemporary Hungarian painting can only be marked with approximate precision, because it is not related to a single direction, aspiration or approach, because it is synthesizing, it represents an art without spectacular turns, meditative nuances, a lonely path. According to the nonfigurative/figurative categorisation, which marks a sharp separation, we can classify András M. Novák's works as abstract, non-abstraction, evoking a reality beyond reality, but with the reservation that naturalistic feedback, references and quotations cannot be excluded definitively and unambiguously. Nevertheless, as this sketch of M. Novák's career and our brief analysis have shown, his works are characterised by lyrical abstraction, expressive expression, the use of collage techniques, the occasional use of objects in an assemblage-like manner, the composition of foreign elements, and the use of conceptual gestures. But even if we approach the work from the point of view of form, approach and creative attitude, we cannot escape the suggestive influence of the essentially depressing atmosphere of this world of art, which is depressing with only a little glimpse of bright colours, but also with the hope of overcoming this pessimistic world. The cruelly ironic gestures and utterances of András M. Novák's painting, the image-documents synthesized into painterly images, force us to confront ourselves harshly, to look back at our past.
[2015]