Game? After all, the satanic violinist of the Solo Sonata... plays...
In his compositions, painter and graphic artist László Sipos builds image spaces in which the simplest basic motifs, everyday objects, pins, pliers, bottles, safety pins, buckles, chain links become dancers in a drama, a circus, a world organizing element. Axis mundi is the pliers, a symbol of destiny is the safety pin. The Poet played with a black piano, visualising the melody of life, László Sipos follows the march, dance, play, danse macabre of objects. The process of how they eventually build into a larger system. "These are 'sonic' images, and not just because of the metallic soundscape evoked by nails, chains, pins, pliers, or the pronounced lack of it. The power of the visualised idea is thus enhanced. "[...] in his paintings, the idea affects the viewer as a spectacle", writes the critic Júlia Szilágyi, the first knowledgeable interpreter of this artistic world, and László Sipos himself declared early in his career that "I don't want to please: I want to impress."
His paintings and graphics are a story, ultimately the story of how the miracle is built. And yes, there is much that is wonderful, but it is man that is most wonderful.
So who is this man?
Following the map of Transylvanian art, it represents the Cluj school. The intellectual powerhouse of Cluj Napoca could obviously be a separate topic, but for the moment the characteristics of the Cluj School of Art are characterised by an intellectualised respect for patina traditions, a Transylvanian representation of the best traditions of modern art, a polarisation of trends, and Transylvanian Hungarian themes in an avant-garde treatment. These works combine Transylvanian and pan-European characteristics in their representation and/or expression. And of course we must also take into account the inspiration of folk art from Calotaszeg - and in the case of Sipos, Csángó.
He speaks fondly of Transylvania, of Cluj-Napoca: "My work was not influenced by the streets, the buildings, the surrounding hills and mountains, but rather by the spirit, the craftsmanship, the honesty of the craft, the knowledge of the profession - and why not? - the magic of craftsmanship, which emanates mainly from the details of the buildings in the city centre: the limestone window frames of the Golden Mason's house - with chalices as advertisements (Király Street) - above the gates, fortunately, there are still many places where you can see the small coats of arms of the inhabitants - scissors, price, boots, needles, etc. - and the sundial hiding in the small courtyards of the Main Square, the Gothic carved windows." "It is the presence of these anonymous masters that I feel is decisive." "My role models are the old masters, their professionalism, their honesty in their craft."
"Transylvanianism" - in László Sipos's works it is not the mere presence or at most the presence of themes and elements of a folk, folkloric approach. In the artistic transfiguration of his themes - objects, plant and animal forms, human faces, fingerprints, etc. - in his metaphorical generalisation, in his expressionist, cubist and above all surrealist actualisation of them as a synthesis of time, one can see from Transylvania to the present day.
This is his Transylvanianism.
At first sight, the paintings and prints represent different, self-existing areas of pictorialism, indicating the ever-expanding range of themes and motifs, the increasingly complex lines of his oeuvre. And above all, they are objectifications of the same already clear-cut creative approach. Whether we follow the line of figurative or abstract imagery, each motif - sun, moon, bell, fish, or circular arc, rhombus - comes to life as part of a larger whole, while the multi-stage construction becomes human in the process. We could invoke a whole range of theories, philosophies and methods to help us interpret this, but they are of no help because the process of this human creation requires a very personal approach.
The "figures" of his symbolic objects (clown, scientist, general) are long familiar from European art of the 20th century, yet he is able to give them new content,
with meanings", writes the critic Tünde Balog jámborné. "The manipulated man, stripped of his personality, appears as a modern Christ in a collage. His face is replaced by an enlarged fingerprint, his neck a rope made of newspaper." The thoughtfulness of the images "is not coupled with a dryness, drawing ideas sparkle on the paper. Clown's mouth zips, his general's head is a watchmaker's watch, pieces of a disintegrated cage form a bird in a drawing". "László Sipos's pages present a harsh and cruel Kafkaesque world, avoiding both one-minute ideologies and momentary temporality." What, then, will be the theoretical construct in which, through which, we can grasp, describe and evaluate the particularities of this artistic world?
Largo. Paper airplanes, pegs, bottles, chains - the ensemble is a symbol of the human spirit's search for the ways in which it experiences the world. So who is this man? What is the world like? Human forms, that is to say, well... the set of objects is built up into an order of making man, wanting to be man, wanting to become man, and everyday objects undergo a wonderful metamorphosis. Drums are the first to be heard in the picture, their rhythmic pulsations and rhythmic patterns are supported by the metallic music of percussion instruments. Sound disturbance? The way the noise of a needle and a chain build into each other? That, if this is the melody of life, these blocks of sound are first of all a mapping of that melody. "László Sipos is an experimental, meditative artist, the message of his paintings is clear in thought," wrote the journalist Károly Krajnik Nagy in 1989.
- The symbolism of the objects, surfaces and lines depicted is powerful and consistent, as each detail, even the hidden subtleties of the editing, has a precisely imagined (suggested...) message." His choice of symbols and, to a lesser extent, his use of colours, are "evidence of a profound knowledge and creative use of folk art and folk motifs".
László Sipos' artwork is as beautiful as crystals. By following the impact of his paintings, the workings of his artwork, we describe the process of how he builds on everyday objects to present the space of the soul, metamorphoses, the transformation of objects into people, the transformation of people into machines, to give a vision, a moral portrait of man. "Cold and objective," writes Tünde Jámborné Balog, "he approaches his subjects from the perspective of rationality, from the ancient symbolism of folk art to the circus, from the responsibility of the scientist to the world of advertising. She deliberately forgoes emotion because she believes in the power of thought. He uses his own symbols to describe a dehumanised world, with its vulnerable human beings." ""Rooster colombiques You are sheer absurdity! [...] It is also a metaphor of Hungarian Transylvania [...], but it is by no means only useful in Hungarian-Hungarian dialogues, there is hardly a place in the world where it cannot be updated. In his review, Csaba Farkas assesses that "its message is universal". "Why does the order created by László Sipos suggest a sense of threat?" asks Júlia Szilágyi. "Is this silent tension emanating from the view, or does the viewer - who is more than the observer - bring his own sense of place to it?" This work of art is a universal human answer to the question: who and what are we?
Scissors, safety pins, iron clamps - following the compositional elements used, his response is thus thinking in terms of a man-machine-animal triad, building a human dimension of the triad of culture-civilisation-nature, or more precisely of its unity - writes Júlia Szilágyi. In the parallel between epic and abstraction, we can read how he also constructs his utopian world in animation, in the circus of becoming human. The avant-garde created 'pure' painting: until then, artwork based on scenes from the Bible, Greek and Latin mythology depicted historical figures, and was thus simply incomprehensible and ungraspable without knowledge of biblical and mythical figures, situations and stories. The avant-garde artwork, without any storytelling, without the epic dimension, conveys its message in a purely pictorial way. At the same time, László Sipos's prints, obviously avant-garde - or even neo-, post-, trans-, etc. - have a definite epic dimension. Here we get picture stories, with music, of course, etudes, sonatas, concertos, even symphonies. On the theme of becoming human.
So the show? The stunt? A game. Dance. Danse macabre. Circus! You have to dance, sir, the music will come from somewhere!" says Zorba the Greek, the hero of Ka- zantzakis. Well, the music, brought by László Sipos' circus of artists, is the organising force here. A wide range of musical genres is found in these pictures, from the brooding tone of the Letters series, the Trumpet in the City, the Horse in the Mask, the General with a Paper Bag, the ironic playing of Peps/s Christ, to the drama of the Skulls series, the complex world view of the Ballads, combining lyric, epic and drama, the emotional scale on which the viewer is led. What's going on here? "The logic of the spectacle is image-like, which awakens thought, thought awakened by image, which evokes vision, vision which is image again," writes the aesthete István Angi. A new image awakened by the artistic spectacle, because the artistic spectacle is an ordered image whose order is a generalization, and whose generalization is an idea-bearing idea: an idea that acts in the visualization of the artistic idea." "Graphic art makes the vision visible and at the same time makes us see." "[...] and, esteemed audience, if there is no pleasure to be had here, at least appreciate what gives birth to such things, the fury of truth-telling."
Staccato. Tough introduction. Sets out the theme. Each instrument is still lonely here. It plays only its own part. The human form, brought to life, steps out into the light. Horns, metallic instruments, double basses, timpani - in Bartók's workshop they call it a bear dance. The main theme is heard. The hopsmaster comes out. Pliers and pins - that's Arlequin tapping away. Comic? Yes. Tragic? Yes - that's irony, combining the two without negating each other, just enhancing their effect. This music, this visible music, is actually interpretation, variations on the human figure visualizing an order of values. Basic axiological concepts: the order of what is and what ought to be. Or rather, their mutual relationship. In other words, the alternatives of the whole of human existence. It is not a question of some much-vaunted social order, a social message, and certainly not a position against current politics. And the Queen is stepping in. László Sipos thinks about freedom in a much more universal way, re-examining the relationship between order and personal freedom. Fate... It's my life. A basic concept in ethics for centuries. To think about fate is to think constantly about the limits of human cognition, because... no, not the answers, man is not capable of that, but the right formulation of questions begins within these limits, and even beyond them. And... around the house, around the garden, the elegant man in black appears for the second time. "Look, Kaspar, what the gardener is doing," Kaspar said to Hauser before he killed him.
The set of objects is thus constructed into a human being, and what kind of human being is clarified in the first, beyond the aesthetic, moral aspect. The portrait of man is constructed here in such a way that the artist believes in three fundamental tendencies: 'Realism,' he says in his studio in Felvinci, 'represented by the Renaissance, surrealism, which begins with Bosch's painterly thinking, and cubism, which has an incredible power to create form and space. That's real magic."
The very fact that László Sipos uses this method of image-making indicates that he is trying to capture the mythical moment when the spirit opens up to the world, when all the seemingly independent details form a single whole. For only in this way can the whole be experienced in its unity, and only by experiencing it in its unity can one speak of it, give a vision of it. This was a favourite game of Mannerism, in which painters made their human figures out of rotting vegetables and fruit. Just as this game then signalled the crisis of the human-centred Renaissance, László Sipos' game should now be seen as a sign of the end and crisis of the modern age that began with the Renaissance. His turn-of-the-century and turn-of-the-millennium mannerisms reflect a decaying world, now fearful of its own components. The theme of Aggression is a paper airplane, a pair of scissors and... What is threatening you? What? It is an ironic way of representing, and the graphics are the best way to explore it. The basic motif on which the whole construction of a picture rests, for example a bottle. A snail shell. Of course, it is hidden somewhere deep in the picture, and it is the task of the viewer to see it, to think with the artist, to reach it, to dig down to it. The next step is the geometrization and abstraction of the building - with its folk art roots, Mary is one of the most successful Transylvanian icons of the late 20th century. Its figurative 'counterpart' - now without any 'play' - is the Csángó Madonna: the pairs of eyes, but most of all the central triangle of the image, the mother's hands reminiscent of a bird's nest, the dove in one hand and the other hand in the middle of the image are a clear indication of this. This image is figurative, the child's hand seems natural, but at the same time truncated. Where the space of the images approaches two-dimensionality - Mary, Samandob is emphatically non-localised, easily helping the viewer to follow the abstraction. The colours... When talking about paintings, was it not primarily about colours? No, because they play a subordinate role, becoming the components of the picture's structure. In a rationalised world where the power of thought is intended to influence the mind of the viewer. The emotional pathways created by colour are only ancillary.
is how László Sipos's sonata on nails and chains, a sonata about a violent world that is dying into its own aggressiveness, exudes - and that it is suicidally aggressive is not a starting point, an axiomatic statement, a truism, but a result, the result of his artistic insight. The world lived around the basic motif is ultimately revealed as such. Einstein's eyes, like the eyes of a burglar... The star has only the grin of a star, otherwise a horse with a smile... Einstein III, the owl covering the bottles, has a... humanly sad look. Play...
Scherzo. The set of objects is built up into an order of human shapes, i.e. objects that are made to be human, want to be human, want to become human, and everyday objects play strange music. Surrealist plays of images and sounds are built on the order of cubist contours, axes and forms. Surrealism's thought experiments. The drums are the first to sound, their percussive pulsations and rhythmic patterns are the basis for the metallic music of percussion instruments. Sound disturbance? The way the noise of a needle and a chain build into each other? That, if this is the melody of life, these blocks of sound are first of all a mapping of that melody.
"László Sipos shows us that it is through art that man becomes a whole again, that art has the task of presenting the lasting in this world that has lost its value."
"[...] in his paintings, thought as spectacle affects the viewer, who is aware of the diversity of the world in the variety of means of an artistic enterprise. These anthropomorphic forms, these figures fixed on a polyhedron and their distracted conceiver, the sad Scientist, these branches and birds nailed to the world, this scissors and needle thread, the pedestal gourd - these almost still lifes, almost portraits - all belong to our world, the props and props of our lives, conveying the anxiety of a civilization that is emptying out - because it is overcrowded."
"Why does the order created by László Sipos suggest a sense of threat? Is this silent tension emanating from the view, or is it the viewer - who is more than the observer - bringing his own sense of place to it?
The faces and figures of existing human figures, well-known personalities and artists - Einstein, Bartók - undergo such a metamorphosis that, beyond a simple description, they recreate man in all three, the aesthetic, the moral, the religious, at the same time.
Molto vivace. The Einstein idea is a recurring symbol in both the graphics and the paintings. "The man of the twentieth century covers his face with masks," says László Sipos. For a long time I was looking for what was available to me, what I could represent... Then I ended up with the genius. What I wanted was for the symbol to convey a sense of responsibility. A sense of intellectual responsibility for everything that is happening in the world today."
László Sipos, the narrator of these picture stories, does not - in the traditional way - directly address the recipient of his artwork, but varies the human figure of his pictures, Bartók, and even more often Einstein, in different situations and figures. Humour, acerbic irony, grotesque vision - the Einstein series is based on the contrast between knowledge and helplessness. Is Einstein wearing a clown mask? In the series, with the naked scientist, the abstraction of the man, the clown, the narrator of the picture story has sought and found a reflective model for the intellectual portrait of the 20th century. The Bartók and Einstein portraits are, in the first interpretation, portraits of creators, in the second, research into the condition humain of the creator, and in the third, intellectual portraits of the 20th and 21st centuries. The narrator of the picture-stories visualises the unresolved tensions of the turn of the century and the millennium.
The hiding creator? Far from it. The games of László Sipos. Here he does not speak to his audience in a traditional way, but says and plays music to his images while changing roles. Just as poet András Ferenc Kovács speaks with his poems as René Sándor Lázáry, or as Jack Cole. The result is a very strong alienating effect - the end of the 20th century brought this change, with the narrator following the characters with detachment and even irony.
What does all this say? What is this work of art? Why paint and draw at all? Variations on man, possible fellow human beings. Why conjure up the bittersweet music of humanizing mutations? Why paint this sound confusion? Sound confusion? Why bring order to it when... "In the grasp of a world-weary infant, not even a bird smiles." (Gizella Hervay: Under the Pictures of László Sipos, The Week, 9.35.1972) "Do you hear this howling that you call silence?" asks German film director Werner Herzog in the opening of the Hauser film. In László Sipos's pictures, in this intellectual turmoil, the figures appear faster and faster, spinning, rattling, chuckling metallically and disappearing - the viewer tends to look for some kind of order. Get back to your market', the hoofer in Fellini's The Clowns rants to the straggling figure of the circle dance on the circus ring. Circle dancing? A naive idea. A dream world, what a pity it is for a child. Round dance... Since the dawn of culture and civilisation, many have written, painted, filmed it, it is superfluous to name names now. The danse macabre - perhaps never a circle dance. The circle presupposes, expresses, realises a cohesion, a togetherness. The danse macabre is never really, and if it is temporarily, it is a cynical parody of a non-existent human community, the much talked about great dream. When the little devil laughs in the face of the dream-seeking host. László Sipos's danse macabre is neither a circle dance nor a dream - see, for example, Csontváry's paintings - and the fragmented, broken dance of the figures is neither linear nor does it bring order. The search of the receiver finds their search.
The artist can express his thoughts by playing music on three strings: compassion, humour and horror," said Pushkin. And large-format artists combine the three registers. László Sipos could not speak otherwise about man, creation, world creation and the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the basic idea he develops in the Ballads series. Ballads? Acts? In the last years of the century, to "think in nudes", in terms of subject and genre, means, unchanged, a return to certain sacral traditions, a communal representation of the unveiling of changing - changing? Ballads? The ballad stories, writes Lajos Vargyas, represent "the emotional part of the transformations affecting the whole culture and the people, while the historical data only tell us about the economic processes and their consequences. That is, here we get an expression of a social transformation, or more precisely, a condemnation of the previous state of affairs from which this new state of affairs has emerged." A single figure, a single dance step, that is the end of the story, the dramatic conclusion itself. But the 'tone' of the drawings is not only based on this, László Sipos' paintings - nails, drum rolls, chains rattling - were never 'silent'. Pushkin's idea is still relevant today, the artist, whether poet or painter, can speak in three tones, compassion, humour and horror - and great artists have always combined and paired them. The avant-garde, and especially contemporary artistic thought, is not at all characterised by a sharp demarcation of genres - these ballads are also reclassified. The tone is Jancsóian; in his films, the frequent "Take off your shirt!" exhortation, armed command, implies an uncanny vulnerability. Here, "thinking in nudes" also implies sadness - since it is a drama - and "half-light", a folk and János Arany tradition, yet the addition of ironic detachment becomes the dominant feature. For it is a rational circus, a circus of doubt, a "world", since the philosopher, no longer the totality of beings, but the totality of the decisions of a community. Ballad. Which invariably combines aesthetic and moral value. László Sipos' ballad is a moral vision. It is a world turned upside down, a picture story of the girl, the outlaw, the bad wife, its downfall told with irony as the world is confused out of its mind. It is a ballad theme. But... is that all? The drawings are not only the result of a kind of turning to the past, a reinterpretation of the past, but also an actualising reinterpretation. The inversion of up and down, right and left, front and back, hands, legs, movements, body axes, their relations, their overall image, are transformed into semicircles, finally into a circular structure, a drifting circle, with no eyes, no face, the victim is faceless, the victim covers the face of his killer, mine, yours, his, "and to you I am you", and who are you? And it starts all over again. An ancient history, a triple mysticism, terrifyingly repetitive, today gives us the opportunity - and again - to say thank you.
Ballads. László Sipos is right in his thinking.
Object imprints of human presence, burlesque figures, self-reflexive pictorial stories - anti-cartoon images? "The miracle is that which, despite everything or because of it, is transformed by the artist into love, into that thirst which only art can quench", wrote Júlia Szilágyi in the catalogue of the artist's exhibition in Cluj-Napoca in July 1994.19 The recipient first reads László Sipos' paintings "in reverse", from sight to thought, and on the way back, in fact, by retracing the process of creation, he reinterprets the initial thought in László Sipos' interpretation. His man made of objects is a tragic burlesque figure, the noisy history of his figures is a search for freedom in the determinate.
László Sipos' work is the tragedy of man painted and drawn in music written on nails and chains.