After the death of Béla Kondor in 1972, after the end of his important, epochal work, in the period following the golden age of Hungarian graphic art in the 1960s and 1970s – towards the end of the 1970s – Péter Stefanovits, graphic artist, produced his first works. After a long and varied period of preparation, which included studies at the chemical industry technical school, window-dressing school and the tasks he undertook in the Opera House’s set design workshop, he graduated in reproduction graphics from the Hungarian College of Fine Arts. At that time, Hungarian graphic art was undergoing a dynamic period of transformation: bidding farewell to classical genres, forms and techniques, new generations of graphic artists were emerging alongside painters and sculptors with a fundamentally avant-garde approach, new visual expressions, new forms and new techniques: Aladár Almásy and Imre Szemethy, Ferenc Banga and Árpád Szabados, the artists of the Lajos Vajda Studio in Szentendre and the Miklós Erdély Circle in Budapest.
In the early years of his career, Péter Stefanovits' studio produced works that were interpreted with a fundamentally expressive–surrealistic approach, evoking elements of reality in a reminiscent manner, while at the same time incorporating abstract formal elements into the composition. An important work typical of this period is A mesemondó [The Storyteller], an etching made in 1976, which is a typical manifestation of the artist's method of construction and composition based on pictorial montage, and in which it is undecidable whether the elements of the figure, which is the central motif of the work, are concrete or abstract formations. (Among the elements of an organism made up of numerous details, the motif of the heart, which recurs so often in later periods, already appears.) Even in his early works, alongside compositions employing traditional unique and reproducible techniques, pieces utilizing the latest artistic production methods also played a role: in his oeuvre, drawings, copper etchings, etchings, linoleum cuts, collages, pastels, and watercolours already appeared with natural ease, later followed by lithographs and digital prints, electrographs, and Clorox compositions. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to his autonomous graphic work, the young artist was also active as a set designer: he was involved in the creation of numerous theatre productions – among others, we can recall the Várszínház [in Budapest] productions based on plays by Pilinszky [one of the greatest poets in Hungary, 1921-1981] and Shakespeare – and in his later creative periods he also tended to move away from flatness of paper and the canvas that carried the image: his installations and objects often left into the space. In addition to the technical diversity, the richness of the sector, genre and art form, there are no major changes of era or style, no sharp turns in his work of more than four decades: from the 1980s onwards, Péter Stefanovits developed a characteristically individual pictorial world through a system of forms, stylistic features, signs and symbols, which only at distant points of connection fits into the 20th century. In the last third of the 20th century, and in the years after the turn of the millennium, he was able to identify a unique and distinctive style of painting that was only remotely connected to the currents or trends of Hungarian – and universal – art. The visual world in which the transcendental approach is of decisive importance has been and is still being formed independently of groups, groupings and artistic phenomena that have been and are becoming increasingly strong and sometimes trends, an ironic and grotesque tone, sometimes intensified and often transformed into playfulness, and which is characterised formally by an emblematic formulation concentrating on a single motif and the use of symbols which thus dominates, and in which the use of painterly expressiveness and the expressive power of colour are a key factor. In his prints and paintings he uses mixed-media techniques most frequently, interpreted with various painterly techniques and often enriched with applications, the human figure appears relatively rarely after the end of the early career period, and when it does, it is more as a puppet-like figure, his subjects are essentially elements of nature and the material world that bear meanings referring to man, assemblages of props taken out of their original environment and context and placed in new and most surprising relationships, phenomena of a strange reality that has matured into the fantastic. It is no coincidence that Katalin Keserü, in her monograph on Péter Stefanovits published in 2007, refers to his paintings as "objects with human qualities, objects of sympathy". In addition, he often uses old photographs, texts and text fragments as important compositional elements in her works.
In his small monograph of 2011, art historian Gábor Pataki captures the most important characteristics of Péter Stefanovits' art, he makes important observations about the transcendent nature of the works. "The hidden impulses, which are obviously hidden from himself, emerge openly from the late 1980s. The motif of the sacrificial cross runs through his oeuvre, from Christ under the burden of the Cross in Jelkép [Symbol] (1976) to the corpse of A holnap leletei I. [The Finds of Tomorrow I] (2010), cast into the desert. This is accompanied by the highly emblematic presence of the altar. Stefanovits's altars are essentially all constructions of regular geometric shapes, horizontal or vertical blocks, or even doorways. Their hieratic, rigid, commanding forms emphasise law, order, the imperative of rules against the contingency and variety of the surrounding environment. They embody at once the strictness of the Old Testament places of sacrifice, obedience to the Lord's commands, and the much more spiritual New Testament privileged spot of the miracle of conversion. In each case, it is a serious emphasis on the sacred as opposed to the profane, the vulgar, even if it is still so dear to us. It is the discipline, voluntarily assumed, which also affects his art, and which is so important in the 'promiscuous', all-embracing era of art, and which prevents the (artistic) arbitrariness from taking hold." The artist's fascination with transcendental phenomena and content may also have inspired him to create monumental compositions for two sacral buildings in Transylvania, one of which was a monumental composition for a specific place: the ceiling of the church in Siklód [Șiclod, Romania], which he painted with the artist Károly Elekes, and the other of the frieze of the chapel of St. Christopher on the shores of Gyilkos-tó [Lacul Roșu, Romania]. The two large-scale compositions open the possibilities of the passage between reality and imagination, between earthly existence and the world beyond earth, with biblical and folk-art imagery, and as Katalin Keserü writes of the frieze of the Chapel of St. Christopher: "It opens up to the faithful a fable that reveals both the presence and the intentions of God."
In a 2007 conversation with art historian Lajos Lóska, Stefanovits said of his transcendental approach and his attraction to sacrality, which is a defining feature of his art: “The essence of a Lajos Fülep-type thinking is that it combines philosophy, religion and art. Despite the rapid changes of the last decades, I believe that the renewal inspired by the art of the 20th century still has a lot of potential. Certain language, ways of thinking, spirituality, emerging in new combinations, can still be contemporary decades later, and can have an impact on their audience. The sacral motifs incorporated into the geometric system are also expressions of this conviction. I believe that this approach has parallels in other artistic disciplines, perhaps most notably in contemporary poetry. I can only refer to the large-scale artist's book, Örök Naptár [The Eternal Calendar], produced in 2001, where visual language meets poetry. I consider this to be my first major digital work."
The art of the 20th century gradually merged artistic disciplines and categories that had previously been sharply separated, and this phenomenon was of course not only present in the formal–technical planes and spaces, but also in the creative method, the creative approach, the expression and the impact of the works. In the work of Péter Stefanovits, we can witness a specific synthesis of graphic art and painting. In his art, sometimes the graphic–painting and sometimes the painting vocabulary is amplified, sometimes they merge into an organic whole, and his works often go out into space. His works are sometimes objectified and embodied alongside the pictorial spheres. An important characteristic feature of his oeuvre is the diversity and variety of his work and his polyphonic artistic expression: he is equally at home with classical techniques and the cultivation of traditional forms as he is with the new spirit of image-making through the latest media – electrographs, digital prints –and he exploits his tools by exploiting the expressive power of line and colour saturated with emotion. In his art, which reflects a world of phenomena, we discover the world around us, which we thought we knew so well, and, looking at and experiencing his works, we are struck by the profoundly deep content and symbolic significance of things that were previously considered simple and transparent.
Along with his artistic endeavours, Péter Stefanovits is also very active in the public art world: he is the director of a foundation for the graphic arts, the head of an art society for the registration of contemporary phenomena in Hungarian art, a teacher of art education at the university, a member of art societies and professional curatorial boards, and one of the professional directors of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
[2016]