Examining the oeuvre of painter and graphic artist Tibor Pataki, a very active creator of contemporary Hungarian art from the seventies of the last century to the present day, reveals a portrait of a typical 20th-21st century artist with an experimental spirit. This type of artist is characterised by a departure from traditional forms, a strong desire to explore unknown territories, and a versatility and an artistic activity that covers a wide range of artistic fields and frontiers. A graduate in painting from the Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts) in Budapest, he has always had a wide-ranging interest in painting, having studied at the Magyar Iparművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts) before taking a five-year apprenticeship and then studying at the postgraduate level. Building on this long period of preparation, his first works in his early career, his first exhibitions, were not representative of his painting studio and his ambitions, but – in keeping with his fascination for Japanese art – were special paper folds: large-scale compositions that projected into space and, through their technical realisation, created links with the origami sector, this special form of artistic expression. All this was also connected with the artistic phenomenon of the rise in the 1980s in Hungarian art of a new approach to paper, driven by new processes and renewed by new methods, which resulted in the appearance in the exhibition halls of works of art that used paper produced with the new process and the use of already existing paper linen, creating a modern approach, a particular formal world, and a special use of materials and technical solutions. The creation of his own works and the study of the works of his contemporaries – as well as his fascination with Japanese art – inspired Tibor Pataki to explore the mysteries and beauties of origami, a fruitful research which was not only attested by the works but also by the publication of the professional conclusions in publications and books: in 1982, his work on the subject was published under the title Papírcsodák (Paper Miracles), and in 1993, his summary of the subject, entitled Hajtogatni jó (Folding is Good). With his origami compositions, Tibor Pataki was active in contemporary Hungarian art in a rather isolated, individual way, but the reception of his other works was not clearly appreciative, as was also indicated in the review of the exhibition Studio ‘83, published by art historian Gábor Pataki: “The ‘new nasty’ appears in the exhibition as the opposite of individual mythology, balancing between the horrifying and the pleasant, between astonishment and resignation. It is a rewarding task, of course, to play on the disgust evoked by worms and beetles (Tibor Pataki, paraphrasing a novella by Dinnyés or Mihály Kornis), and to complement this with elegant, aesthetic execution (Pataki). The resulting ‘pleasantly disgusting’ art form, playing on ambivalence, can be complemented by a repulsive, almost perversely precise horniness…”
After a period of research into the expressions and possibilities of paper folding, and a period of interest in book objects and large-scale paper sculptures, Tibor Pataki’s applied graphic art became more and more important in his work: he produced a host of publications, dozens of books, a series of book covers and hundreds of illustrations. In the second half of the nineties, he turned again to autonomous sectors: water, the surface of water, and reflection became the central motif and symbolic expression of his painting and sculpture – a turn that was certainly linked to his passion for Venice and his view of Monet (whose life and works he had studied and visited several times in France, including the studio house in Giverny). After the turn of the millennium, in addition to painting, the creation of small and large-format compositions, especially landscape works, the book-objects, the artist’s book, the reinterpretation of books, became a central problem in his art, inspired by the desire to realise the impractical ideas that arose in the course of the graphic design tasks he had to solve in the publishing practice. In the meantime, he has also produced significant works of computer art and electrographs, which have opened up new technical possibilities, but the most significant works of his oeuvre are those related to the world of books: artist’s books, series inspired by books (Sorskönyvek (Books of Destiny), Könyvtájak (Book Landscapes), Könyvtár (Library), Lélektár (Soul Books), Évgyűrűk (Annual Rings)). These works are compositions transposed on a plane and organised in space: panel paintings, graphics: prints and electrographs, as well as spatial constructions, reliefs and free-standing objects. Discussing Sorskönyvek (Books of Destiny), the artist noted: ‘...each book, with its unreadable, and therefore secret and exciting, story on its pages, reveals human destinies. The exciting spectacle that emerges from the interlacing of the books expresses human relationships, with their variety, their structure, their suggestion of drama and joy, all the while retaining something of the unknowable, just as the lives of others and the driving forces of their relationships cannot be fully known.”
Tibor Pataki's books, broadly categorized as “artist’s books”, can also be classified as a new art form from the end of the 20th century, and their significance no longer lies in the informal or artistic or literary content of their texts, but in the artistic design within the framework of the book form, the creation of a new aesthetic quality, new ideas, and, of course, the book as a symbol and the unfolding and embodiment of the content it carries. In the course of the individual book-making processes, in the analysis of the structure, layering and rules of real books, Tibor Pataki discovered a new image of the book, outlined by the dismantling and cutting of the book, which reveals to us the dimensions of the book that we never see and experience in everyday life when turning the pages and looking at the books in our hands. This artist is a successor to the cubist collage artists of the 1920s: his most beautiful works are based on old book volumes, but he uses the found material to create not only the usual flat collages, but also radically new compositions, layered in planes, like sections, flat sculptures and reliefs. In his works, cut engravings of the arches of old law books and telephone directories appear, defined by the thickness, fineness and colour of the paper, the order and shades of the text fields printed on it, sometimes exactly fitting together, sometimes disturbed by minor or major slips, showing creases, placing a detail of the text fields on the surface of the picture. In addition to the medium of the paper and the symbolic messages of the book, these works, which form an organic unity and synthesis with all of these, are concentrators of visual-plastic phenomena of particular sensitivity: as if landscapes, top views of the earth seen from a great distance or etchings of the earth’s layers were unfolding before us. And lest the term “long distance” be misleading, it is recommended that these works be viewed up close: this is how the fantastic richness of detail and nuance of the compositions can appear and unfold before the viewer. In addition to these collages of book fragments, another important group of Pataki’s works are the books of fate, which are created by the strange fusion and interweaving of two books that have been turned inside out. The strange formal arrangement and fantastic unity that is created in this way is demonstrated not only by the book objects but also by the computer-generated images and prints made of them. In a conversation, the artist said of his work: “I took two books and, turning them towards each other, I gently scanned them page by page. The two books became so one that they could not be taken apart. I was astonished that they could not be torn apart. It had a strong symbolic meaning for me, it was about human relationships.” In other words, in Tibor Pataki’s artistic world we are confronted with symbols and metaphorical phenomena: a world that plays with subtleties and sensitivities, with very deep intellectual, cultural and art historical connections – and not least with human lessons on a general level – and with amazing creative ingenuity, and which presents us with meditative images, meditative spaces and meditative objects in a unique way in contemporary Hungarian art. By using paper and books as a new medium, Pataki’s works allow us to wander in a realm of subtleties and beauties, nuanced with serious content – and this, considering the threats of the ugly reality around us, can be considered a significant artistic activity and creative achievement.
“Tibor Pataki is a true experimenter, at the same time a deeply humanistic artist, a contemporary innovator of traditions,” wrote György Szegő, the curator of the exhibition, with insightful brevity in the catalogue of the artist’s 2020 exhibition in Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle). Indeed, to slightly expand on this conclusion, the general characteristics of the artist can be summarised as the fact that he is autonomous and at home in both autonomous and applied sectors, and that he is a painter, graphic artist and sculptor who creates significant and curious works, a highly skilled artist, working in traditional artistic fields and sectors, moving away from traditional forms and techniques and creating compositions that are mainly close to the category of collages and objects. His unconventional works, created with a unique approach and methods enriched with independent solutions, are transformed into suggestive artistic expressions and embodiments by an ingenious formal realisation, beyond deep content and general messages. In the first decades of the 21st century, when the role and significance of the book, the book as a medium, as an object that conveys and transmits content, seem to be increasingly receding into the background, Tibor Pataki’s book works can be seen as private memorials to one of the most important requisites of earlier eras.
[2022]