About the art of Tamás Szabó
Tamás Szabó, who graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts, was already interested in the possibility of autonomous, traditional sculptural works when he started his career, at the turn of the seventies and eighties of the last century, and he did not break away from the traditional method of object formation, nor did he give up during his more than three decades of work, which has continued to the present day. Even his first mature works were compositions executed with classical sculptural techniques, with patterning, casting and carving, using traditional materials such as bronze, stone and wood, and his later works, which testify to this choice of materials and use of techniques, also meet the criteria of the formal and genre categories that have crystallised over the centuries and have remained unchanged over the centuries until the present day, the so-called "autonomous sculptural work". and monumental sculpture - have assumed and represented the status and position of autonomous sculptural works.
Of course, the overall picture of Tamás Szabó's artistic activity is not so pure and simple, it is a bit more complex. Even the beginning of his career is unusual: after completing his studies, Tamás Szabó graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in the late seventies not as a sculptor but as a glass artist, and at the 1979 Studio Exhibition of Young Artists in Pécs he presented two geometric glass sculptures entitled Hasáb and Oszlop (The Belly and the Column). Two years later, in 1981, at the annual Young Artists' Festival in Szeged, he presented a small bronze entitled Stepping Warrior and Mary, and a copper sculpture entitled I'm Going, I'm Returning to My Place. The Stepping Warrior, a 28-centimetre small sculpture, depicts a figure stepping forward with his right foot, his upper body covered and held together by a tight, hoop-like drapery - a motif that evokes bondage rather than shrouding - while Mary is a distant relative of Renaissance stone carvings: a work radiating harmony and painful beauty. At the 1981 National Biennale of Small Sculpture in Pécs, the young artist presented tiny bronze portraits measuring 7 and 11 centimetres: Ida Csabainé Kis and Krisztina Horváth were powerful heralds of the portrait art that unfolded in the 1980s, sometimes producing series, sometimes concentrated in a single work, at times receding and then reviving, but embodied in small works. These small portraits, in stark contrast to the Mary, are more a reflection of ugliness and ugliness than of beauty. The ugly, the distorted, the disharmonious gradually became a characteristic feature of Tamás Szabó's sculpture, which became more and more pronounced in the 1980s.
Already the first important works by Tamás Szabó - busts and portraits executed in small sizes, made of porcelain and various metals, due to the limited material and technical possibilities - indicated that this artist does not deal with trends and currents, does not seek stylistic alignment, does not choose a master and does not join a group, but - finding his voice and outlining the thought-content circles he wants to capture - goes his own way. Finding an autonomous, independent voice was by no means easy: Tibor Vilt and József Somogyi were still creating powerful works, Tamás Vígh and Imre Varga were creating important works, István Bencsik, Miklós Melocco and Pál Kő were creating monumental works that were resonating vividly, and now he was working in the spirit of naturalistic shaping, We have referred to the work of some of the most important Hungarian masters, and Géza Samu and Imre Bukta, who had previously been unknown in Hungarian art, created works with a new approach, but still somehow in touch with figurativity. Tamás Szabó's ideal and artistic guiding principle - placing the human figure, the subject of sculpture with its millennia-old history, at the centre of his art with its essentially naturalistic spirit - was the perfection of the work, its high degree of technical form and brilliant execution. However, as in the creation of form, in the working of materials, in the technical solutions and in the execution, he was not preoccupied with imitation, copying and the adoption of proven solutions - as was also attested to by the material of his 1983 exhibition at the Studio Gallery and the critical reception of the ensemble. As art historian Bálint Chikán noted in his essay published in Művészet:
"Perhaps the longest established compositional form of his work is the bust. We can also recall the porcelain heads he made at the beginning of his career, whose aesthetic character was gradually and completely eclipsed by the shaping of form in the service of the message. In each of the pride of place pieces in the exhibition, we can sense that the artist was trying to capture a typical human character. The sculptures are all coloured - the aluminium painting is one of Tamás Szabó's most recent experiments. This is not a step towards naturalistic illusionism, but a search for a means to highlight and emphasise the essence."
Tamás Szabó's busts, and then the marble heads that followed them, these life-size faces, portraits of strangers, fantasy portraits, twice as large as life, were greeted with acclaim by the profession and critics: the young sculptor won numerous exhibition prizes with these works in the 1980s. The faces, which are strung on diagonal axes, grasped in an upside-down equilibrium position, with their faces turned upwards with a strangely distorted head or a sharply slit skull, usually with closed eyes and closed mouth, have once again turned the bust or portrait form into an exciting sculpture, after so many conventional, standard, boring solutions and repetitions of form. The sculptor has turned the high, arched, broken foreheads, the dented temples, the heads accentuated by the forward, elongated chins and lips, into a curious fusion of ugliness and beauty. Enveloped in the sublime silence of death masks, the portraits of the unknowns, surrounded by shimmeringly smooth concave and convex, softly sloping surface-paintings, are simultaneous, simultaneous evocations of dramatic turmoil and harmonious life-feelings.
After the sculptural conquest of the head and the face, Tamás Szabó turned to the human figure, and the figures presented at the 1979 Drawing were cast in bronze, structured in two- and three-figure compositions, and presented in small sculptures united by mysterious, dramatic conflicts. As in the drawings of the period, the sculptures show bodies bound together by drapery, tied and tied in a bind. Of course, the body and the bond go far beyond the problem of the relationship between body and drapery: they are the subjects, the scenes and the embodiments of the unfolding of conflicting contents and meanings. The shaping of the body covered with drapery is primarily the field of aesthetic plastic problematics, while the bound body is the focal point of rough and aggressive, tragically charged meanings, the mediator of serious contents.
The unusual "portraits of unknowns" series was expanded in the 1980s to include compositions of young boys, scientists and men with bandaged heads, cast in bronze, carved and painted in wood - the major work in this series being the painted wood and later bronze versions of 1990, Van Gogh, now in a prestigious private collection - and then, after a long break, at the turn of the millennium, this group of works was continued and completed by the initial series of stone carvings and painted aluminium castings with geometric headdresses, which were initially interspersed with distorted heads and which carried Egyptian reminiscences (Wavy-Haired I., In addition to the busts and head sculptures created in the spirit of the autonomous sculptural programme, several commissioned portraits were also produced in Tamás Szabó's studio (by then already located in the Százados út Artists' Centre in Budapest). Thus, in 1985, the sculptor's Martinov portrait found a home in the sculpture gallery in the Petőfi Art Translators' Park in kiskőrös, then in 1989, his bronze evoking Pál Szemere was erected in Pécel, while in 1992, his Vaszary bust was placed in Tata, and in 1997, his Barcsay bust in Szentendre. The two most important works of the group are the sensitive bronze sculpture of János Vaszary in pastel colours, a self-portrait of his youth, placed in the wall of a school hall, which is completely unknown in professional circles, and a delicately modelled composition of the elderly Szentendre master Jenő Barcsay, with a patterned stick attribute hung loosely on the stone plinth next to the portrait, in a small square in the town's Samár Hill district. Both works show an excellent sense of character, precise shaping and inspired sculpting.
The seventy-metre-long Frieze, made in 1981 and running around the roof of the Ajtósi Dürer Street building in Budapest, then home to the Political College, and the lyrical fountain with a child figure in Nagykanizsa in 1985, as well as the Martinov portrait, were only a prelude to Tamás Szabó's rather strange public engagement. After successful tenders and masterfully solved, large-scale commissions, the artist, who in the meantime had grown up and joined the middle generation of contemporary Hungarian artists, did not receive any significant work for years: even in the long, long list of the creators and works of the huge 2000-2001 Millennium sculpture flood, we cannot find his name or his sculpture. Despite this, Touching, which was a unique composition - a three-figure interpretation of a biblical theme - and a sculptural masterpiece of sovereign vision, was erected in Kisvárda in 1987, in a project that won a competition and was a rather unanimous success in Hungary, and three years later the Carl Lutz monument inaugurated in Budapest convinced potential clients of Tamás Szabó's monumental inclinations and his masterly sculptural virtues, which can be put to good use in public spaces. But despite all this, he was only given one big job after that - until 2003: in 1996 he was given the opportunity to design and build the 56th memorial, a reminder of the tragic historical past of his hometown Salgótarján. And although, in a more fortunate case, the public works could have been completed with a further series of monumental works, these three works will be handed down to posterity as complete and convincing creative achievements, as memorials of communal purpose intended to be permanent.
From the nineties onwards, sculpture gradually took a back seat in his work, and he began to paint with elemental vigour. Already at the 1992 exhibition in the Csontváry Room, organized jointly with his wife Judit Makó, he presented mainly oil compositions, and then the dominance of panel paintings was characteristic of his solo exhibitions in Budapest, including those in the Vigadó Gallery in 1993, the Körmendi Gallery in 1995 and the Aulich Art Gallery in 2002 (where, in addition to oil compositions, ink drawings were also shown). His painting is perfected in the sense of creating a show: the artist works on a single motif or a group of motifs in several versions, in many variations, and he explores a single painterly problem in a series of compositions. Such coherent images include the works entitled The Rope and the Self, the works that deal with the screaming head motif from Leonardo de Vinci's study of the Anghiari cutaway, which is kept in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the series of paintings that are a series of paintings of the striped trouser-clad body of rock star Mick Jagger. Painted with charcoal and acrylic mixed with ash and enriched with graphic elements, the surfaces of the paintings show human bodies unfolding in neutral, elusive colour spaces, figures forming into the concreteness of moments. Around the focal points of the anatomical masterpieces, which glow with tension, the painter does not specify anything: there is no indication of the scene, no reference to the setting, no additional elements or attributes, no indication of time and place, no indication of circumstances. The composition is organised in deep, fiery colour flickers. All at once starkly neutral and all overheatedly personal. Only the male body, wrestling with unknown forces or with maddening nothingness, wrestling with itself, is revealed to the viewer. Something suffocating, something tormented, some kind of panic fear that attacks from within and without, some kind of half-interrupted movement, some kind of transformation from nothingness or dissolution into nothingness prevails in these works, even though another shoulder flashes, another bruised belly reveals itself, a back that rises out of the darkness is about to explode. The detail, the fragment appears in the guise of completeness. The symbolism and the meaning of the pictorial vision is related to the content of the circle of content captured in the sculptures: the passionate, powerful, yet somehow inert situations of life, the allegory and metaphor of a dying, empty, drifting towards its tragic end.
One of the last monumental works made at the moment, the János Balázs memorial statue in Salgótarján, is not a conventional portrait monument either, but a public bronze sculptural vision of a strange apparition, strung together from two elements, thus concentrating and radiating dynamic spatial forces. The standing figure of the delicate, fragile painter, holding a cat in his hands, whom Tamás Szabó reveres as the master of his youth, sculpted with traditional tools and represented in portrait-like detail, confronts a head sculpture on a stand, constructed of strange, simplified forms and framed by a hard-cut outline. This Salgótarján composition of an astonishing self-portrait of the artist and the artist, enlivened by profound enigmas, may remind us of Miklós Melocco's Ady monument in Debrecen, placed in 1977 on the Nagyerde promenade, which rises into the sphere of eccentricities, where the standing bronze figure of the poet is confronted with his own death mask and his tomb. Tamás Szabó's sculpture of 2004 was the subject of an analytical essay by fellow painter József Gaál on the 20th century. "János Balázs, along with Sándor Török and Dezső Mokry-Mészáros, is the most important Hungarian artist who, drawing on the unconscious, created dreamlike, seemingly archaic visions. ... He was an original talent, who, by skipping all rules, brought to the surface a spiritual world almost as a medium. From the rudimentary depiction of the gypsy settlement, he moved on to the method of symbolic image-assemblage, where he is able to compress a cosmic chain of stories into a single composition. Even in his earliest works, motifs from everyday life are combined with inner visions. In this austere, simple but deeply felt man, inner experiences have been transformed into visions, into sprawling tales." In other words, it was no easy task for this painter to create a monumental memorial: his figure, his personality, his vision of the world and his life's work had to be evoked, the characteristics of his art, the essence of his art had to be represented in sculptural terms, and on a more general level, it had to be brought into conflict with the essence of art. Péter Földi, a contemporary painter who accompanied the work throughout its realisation, says that the undertaking was a success:
"The work and the artist are confronted in Tamás Szabó's monument to János Balázs. The idol-like sculpture - placed on a stand - with its compressed use of symbols, evoking the ancient form (spirit) of art, confronts the artist, who stands before us in his vivid humanity, with his extremely characteristic, sensitively modelled work. Such a deeply felt, lifelike presence of the creative personality, János Balázs, elevates the figure, fallible in his fragility and humanity, to the status of a mythical hero of the field, thus further enhancing and exemplifying the oeuvre as a whole for all observers (the townspeople). The two "masses", treated in a very material way, are both richly detailed and symbolic, and become a work of great suggestive power and impact.
With the birth of the János Balázs statue, not only the group of monumental works of the artist was enlarged with an exceptional work - and not only the contemporary Hungarian public sculpture was enriched with an unusual composition, which reveals strange beauties, is rich in ideas and original plastic achievements -, but it also brought a turning point in the career of Tamás Szabó: The "idol-like sculpture", which "evokes the ancient form (spirit) of art", placed on a stand, became the starting point for a major new programme. In 2005, the artist presented a series of idol-like head sculptures at the Picture Frame Salon Gallery in Tokaj, Budapest, in collaboration with the painter Judit Makó, and these new works were part of the MORPH group (István Drabik, József Gaál, János Kalmár, Attila Mata, Tamás Szabó and, initially, László Taubert), and in 2008, in the spiralling, mysterious radiance of the Zikkurat Gallery next to the National Theatre, he presented a large selection of his large-scale busts, created with unusual material processing and use of tools, in a solo performance entitled New Works 2004-2008. In her analysis of the MORPH Group's 2006 exhibition at the Aulich Art Gallery in Budapest, art historian Judit Szeifert also drew attention to the major turning point in the sculptor's career in 2004-2005:
"Metamorph means transformed, changed. The works of Tamás Szabó and József Gaál can also be linked to this transformed, changing state, albeit from different aspects. Tamás Szabó relates the change in his art to the fact that he is now in his fiftieth year. His earlier figurative compositions have been replaced by a series of sculptures with an emphatic reduction of idols and totems. In addition to the realistic use of form, he also moved away from the classical use of materials (marble, bronze) that had been characteristic of his earlier work. Among his current sculptures, there are also bronze castings (Column Head, 2004), but in most of them he shapes the surface of the sculptures by applying iron plates (Holey Eye, 2005) or nails (Nailed Head I-II, 2004-2005) to a lead base. Regardless of the techniques and materials used, the facture of the sculptures creates a rustic and archaic effect (Hole-Nosed, 2005; Third Witness, 2006). The ritual ceremonies of ancient times, of ancient cultures, the inherent magic of art, are evoked in the works of Tamás Szabó (Remembrance I-II, 2005)."
Tamás Szabó's sculptural ensemble, with its delicate interplay of beauty and ugliness, and his series of paintings, depicting the human figure wrestling with nothingness, the unknown, the unknown self, are the product of a life's work built with impressive fertility and richness, and at the same time an extremely valuable chapter in contemporary Hungarian art. If we look back over this artistic arc of three decades and a half, we can take stock of the portraits, which are enveloped in beautiful ugliness, distortions and distortions that almost create harmony, the small sculptures that conceal strange secrets, and the suggestive, deeply moving monuments composed as sublime summaries of tragedies and dramas, and recalling the oppressive, impassioned world of drawings animated by shadows and dark shadows, of heavy graphics and panel paintings captured with expressive brushstrokes, we can painfully register and sadly state the epochal and serene desperation of this artistic reflection and creation, which is tragic in tone, inherently hopeless, and carries the consciousness of futile struggle.
[2012]