From the 1960s – and, with particular emphasis on the 1970s – through the political transition in Hungary and the Romanian Revolution, a group of Transylvanian artists, fleeing an insane dictatorship, found in Hungary both a new home and a new creative milieu. Tibor Szervátiusz, Endre András Tornay, Károly Elekes, György Jovián, Sándor Krizbai, Csaba Borgó György, Erzsébet Katona Szabó, Árpád Pika Nagy, Attila Diénes – the list could be extended at length, and it attests that among the artists from the severed parts of the country, including many from Transylvania, more than a few, having completed their studies in their places of birth, unfolded their talent and built their oeuvres only after resettling in the mother country. László Szotyory, born in 1957, is also a member of this cohort; yet he arrived in Hungary in 1970, still a child, with his family, and completed both his secondary education and his higher artistic training here, in Veszprém and Budapest. His artistic interest began to awaken during his years at the outstanding educational institution in the Transdanubian city, the Lovassy László Secondary Grammar School, where the graphic artist Zoltán Bognár served as his excellent art teacher. He began his focused art studies at the Veszprém workshop run by the painter Ottó Vágfalvi, and later attended the Dési Huber István Free School in Budapest for a year, under the leadership of the painter Ervin Tamás. Meanwhile, he participated in amateur exhibitions in his age group and won a prize at the Helikon competition. After successful entrance examinations, in 1978 he began his studies at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts, where his master was Ignác Kokas (alongside Gábor Dienes), who granted maximum freedom even during the preparatory period while attending devotedly to his students. He retained this autonomy and the freedom that shaped his creative work even after graduating as a painter in 1983: from the outset, he went his own way, joining neither artistic groups nor current stylistic circles or movements.
In the last third of the twentieth century, as slow yet radical, barely perceptible movements and changes began in the deeper strata of society under socialism, Hungarian art, and Hungarian painting in particular, were shaped by the concurrent presence and parallel trajectories of numerous endeavours and stylistic currents. Figurative initiatives associated with official art were present, as were oppositional, avant-garde positions, largely abstract in character. Thus, long-lived realist and post-impressionist tendencies remained prominent, while alongside them, expressionist intentions, pop art, hyperrealism, planar constructivism, conceptual art, and the trends characterised by ‘new painting’, transavantgarde, and postmodern attitudes, alternately intensified, receded, regained momentum, or ran out of steam. Gradually, too, new media gained ground, as did works born of image-making methods that synthesised new qualities in those media. All this unfolded within the bastions of a culture and arts policy believed to be solid – that of a communism proclaimed as communal yet leading to a dead end – and still somewhat isolated from global artistic developments. During the early phase of Szotyory’s career, a major event was the 1984 exhibition Frissen festve (Freshly Painted), staged under the rubric of ‘new sensibility’, which opened a narrative of painting dominated by the generation that emerged at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, this was also a period when artists working outside the phenomenon of the new sensibility were laying the foundations of, or unfolding, their painterly oeuvres: Imre Bukta, Pál Deim, Péter Földi, József Gaál, Péter Kovács, and the leading figures of the Vajda Lajos Stúdió in Szentendre – István ef Zámbó, László fe Lugossy, and András Wahorn. The new situation following the political transition opened up free spaces in the arts as well – albeit spaces that, becoming somewhat ownerless, were increasingly stripped of state care and financial resources – and thus ushered in an era of total artistic multiplicity and diversity, of complete branching: a milieu that created and determined creative possibilities, in which we witnessed an ever-stronger process of the subjectivisation of art, moving ever further away from social questions and problems. ‘Individual mythology’ became a key – indeed, a magical – concept in art history.
In an age of turbulent change, amid the powerful surf of (neo)avant-garde trends, Szotyory opted for tradition: in the second half of the 1980s he exhibited panel paintings executed in a nature-based spirit and in accordance with the ideals of figurative painting, using traditional means. He has continued to paint in the same spirit to this day, most often in oil, initially on hardboard and, since the turn of the millennium, almost exclusively on canvas. One may read, as a painterly programme, the lyrically motivated lines the artist published in the catalogue of his first significant solo exhibition, held in 1991 at the Stúdió Galéria in Budapest: “I paint scenes I would gladly walk into. I encountered these sights and feelings by chance, and their atmosphere was strange. Not idyllic, but rather enigmatic and odd. The pictures are memories of concrete experiences – or merely memories of feelings. Although the scenes are invented, I feel they are things that have happened or could happen – or perhaps I merely wish they would. That is why I paint them for myself. While I am painting – if the painting is going well – I am also there in that landscape, and I keep shaping it so that its atmosphere is as pleasing to me as possible. I feel at ease among my characters. I study what gives buildings such an intense, personality-like effect, and what makes a realistic landscape both real and estranging. I speculate about what kind of relationship there might be between two women waiting for a boat, or about who, towards evening, set off somewhere at the edge of a small neon-lit town. And who those three men in white shirts might be, one of whom has a pistol hanging at his side. And what kind of sudden wind is driving the clouds above that castle and making the bushes in its garden flutter, and what or whom the girl, who looks like Marilyn Monroe, might have been frightened by as she runs towards us. It may be that I like painting landscapes that are a little frightening. And sometimes I feel the buildings are that way too. The landscape surrounding these scenes is very important. It is not gentle, beautiful nature that excites me, but the landscape in which the city and technology together form a scene with clouds, with sunset, perhaps with the sea. For me, this is how a new romantic landscape is born, one that mirrors the mood and facial expressions of the scenes’ protagonists. I also need it to be possible to see far into the distance somewhere in the picture, so that I can feel the presence of an inscrutable infinity. This reassures me that we are not enclosed; it lures and encourages me to believe that beyond what is visible, something is still happening.”/1. In that exhibition, the most significant compositions from the early phase are hung on the walls: Kastély (Castle, 1988), Félelem (Fear, 1989), Melankólia (Melancholy, 1989), Üzletemberek (Businessmen, 1989), Reggeli a szabadban (Breakfast Outdoors, 1991) and Menekülés (Escape, 1991). In the review published in the art journal reporting on the Budapest debut, it was noted that Szotyory, with apparently conventional subject choices, creates works that evoke still lifes, people, landscapes and buildings, yet the things, persons and motifs do not carry their customary meanings: the pictorial atmosphere is disturbed by alien, unfamiliar feelings, moods and moments. Men and women appear in strange situations and in relationships difficult to clarify; landscapes seen from unusual vantage points are fixed, opening their vistas; and beneath ominous skies, buildings, embodied as peculiar personalities, rise up. Everything is everyday, almost conventional – and at once odd, strange, unusual, bizarre, peculiar, alien. Considering these pictorial phenomena, one could already at that time identify mysticism, enigma, riddle-like ambiguity, and secrecy as the most important characteristics of Szotyory’s compositions. Within the muted colouration – cold, icy shades of green and blue, darkened by black – the memory-like images allude to films and to actors who personify film characters: it is as if Marilyn Monroe, Michel Piccoli, or Clint Eastwood were to appear in a composition, surrounded by blurred, uncertain contours – yet the casually elegant figures generally retain their mysterious incognito./2.
Following the 1991 exhibition at the Stúdió Galéria, Szotyory’s regularly staged solo shows – in Budapest and in provincial cities, often comprising works painted within the gravitational field of a single painterly theme (for example: 1999 Budapest, Budapest History Museum, Municipal Gallery – Kiscelli Museum; 2000 Székesfehérvár, King Saint Stephen Museum; 2005, 2008, 2013 Budapest, Várfok Gallery; 2015 Budapest, Karinthy Salon; 2019 Kunsthalle Budapest) – together with his continuous presence at major Hungarian and international Hungarian art forums and group exhibitions, indicated the continuity (constancy) of a consistently assumed artistic stance and the barely traceable stages in the realisation of a conscious painterly programme. These exhibitions, in an almost chronological order, reflect the thematic nodal points that have concentrically defined this painter’s work over recent decades, and whose development, minor changes and subtle shifts we have been able to follow through works regularly presented to the public. Thus, as closely related units, one may register groups of works inspired by scenes and protagonists – stars – of American films; above all, Mediterranean landscapes or tropical park paintings and cityscapes; building compositions emerging within wild, romantic landscapes; evocations of the human figure and portraits; animal depictions – dogs (bloodhounds), wolves, lions – and compositions featuring cars and aeroplanes. (A characteristic feature that cannot be bypassed is that no composition that goes beyond so-called elements of reality – no abstract painting – has come into being in Szotyory’s studio.)
In the 1980s and at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Szotyory’s painting featured figurative compositions that presented film scenes, car vignettes and architectural depictions, all shaded by an American atmosphere and a ‘New World’ mood (N. Y. [N.Y.], 1992; Új Mexikó [New Mexico], 1992; A híd [The Bridge], 1992). In the 1990s, his interest turned towards parks adorned with sculptures and fountains; then, in the second half of the decade, depictions of nature became increasingly forceful: images – or, more precisely, renderings – of groves, avenues, forests, riverbanks, and waterfalls (Via Sacra [Via Sacra], 1994; Tájkép [Landscape], 1998; Kút a ciprusok között [Fountain Among Cypresses], 1999; A nagy szökők [The Great Fountains], 1999; Sötét vízesés [Dark Waterfall], 2000). The landscape, as Szotyory renders it, plays, in multiple ways, with oddities – with the riddling tension between regularities and irregularities, and with the duality of verisimilitude and imaginativeness. The occasional road section that appears almost by chance, and the fountain placed in a privileged position, suggest a regulated, conquered nature. Yet the seemingly untouched clearings and groves, fragments of forest, water’s edges and mirror-like surfaces also – by virtue of their composedness – hint at civilisational interventions. We may therefore assume that, as we wander through Szotyory’s pictures, we are in a park, the domain of nature and of nature conquered, kept in check, regulated and ordered by human will – a transitional medium. Above the Szotyory-park, the Szotyory-landscape, bizarre lights glimmer; light and dark mingle and dissolve into one another – it cannot be decided whether dawn is breaking or evening is falling – and within the dark greens mixed with greys, and the blues turning into black, something heavy seems to be at work, a sense of threat, as if fear were woven into these ominous shades wrapped in darkness. In Szotyory’s dizzying, mysterious pictures saturated with secrecy, every motif matters: sky, trees, shrubs, clearings, water surfaces, lights, and shadows. Perhaps as a consequence of recognising that things cannot be grasped or named with painterly precision, forms dissolve, becoming soft, dulled, and uncertain: outlines and sharpness vanish, and a sombre, muffled atmosphere pervades, washing the pictorial elements and pictorial media into unity. János Géczi, analysing Szotyory’s parks and landscapes painted in the 1990s, wrote: “The park, which is less ambivalent than the landscape yet, by contrast, more metaphysical, fits our painter’s pictorial intentions very well these days… Although Szotyory’s parks are generally empty spaces without people, on their stage there unfold lurking, anthropomorphic tragedies, curse-laden stories, divine wickednesses and novels planned for pleasures… Yet remaining with ambivalences: our painter’s panopticon-like organisation of space, his lack of narrative, can simultaneously be an imitation of mythical situations and a memento of what has happened. It can also be an enumeration, an inventory, whole and fragment, signalled and signifying – and, of course, above all, a painting.”/3. The world of Szotyory’s parks and landscapes is recognisable, yet it arouses doubt, suspicion, and plays with oddities. The everyday and the verisimilar are transposed into the mystical, almost the unreal – although what we see are seemingly entirely plausible slices of nature – and this duality, this boundary condition, focuses the conceptual and intellectual intricacy of Szotyory’s pictures: the mirroring of the millennial human being’s crisis-state, even without the presence of people. Szotyory’s landscape depictions also confirm observations formulated by the art historian Katalin Keserü in her analysis of Imre Bukta’s art regarding modern landscape painting: “Perhaps the most significant series of civilisational and genre-historical events of the last centuries has unfolded around the landscape (picture). The revaluation of landscape and nature is linked not only to an urbanisation of incredible scale and speed, but also – through secularisation and profanisation – to the special, the sacred, and the places that preserve traditions; to terrestrial, aquatic, aerial, and space travel, and to the changing viewpoint and mode of seeing both earthly and cosmic landscapes; and, with the realisation of the relative value of the so-called grand narratives, to an interest in the micro-histories of nature, which does not participate actively in those narratives.”/4. Examining the process of the landscape picture’s transformation, Keserü’s conclusion is as follows: “The condition for transformation is the identification of the work and the landscape, and, for this, the conviction that the landscape is essentially the same as the human being (the artist), and that the work represents precisely this. That is: a subjective interpretation of work and landscape, and the qualification of the subjective as objective; the dissolution of the boundary between the two, which also means the disappearance of the difference between the world of the artwork and the environment.”/5.
Just as the artist’s 1992 American trip had enormous significance for the development of his painting – he produced numerous characteristic compositions that processed motifs typical of American landscapes and cities, translating an American sensibility into his works (Kaliforniai este [California Evening], 2000; Magasvasút [Elevated Railway], 2007; Nevada [Nevada], 2008; Felhőkarcolók [Skyscrapers], 2009) – so too did his two Italian scholarship periods bear significant fruit: his Roman creative phases in 1985 and 2004 (Temető Rómában [Cemetery in Rome], 2005; Róma [Rome], 2008). The aeroplane paintings created around the turn of the millennium, following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, can also be associated with travel experiences and memories, longing and return (A repülők I., II. [The Aeroplanes I, II], 2001; Óriás lények találkozása [Meeting of Giant Creatures], 2008; Égi bálna II. [Sky Whale II], 2009). His impressions of these aerial vehicles, his wonder-filled feelings, are attested to by the intimate confession the artist recorded in one of his notes about aeroplanes and the pictures depicting them: “Aeroplanes have long preoccupied me, almost as much as cars. I see both as living beings with faces and eyes like some animal. The big aeroplanes, most of all, bring whales to mind. They are so large that they tower above us, frighteningly, covering a piece of the sky; yet this frightening quality does not repel me – it fascinates me. But I am also interested when they fly like tiny creatures in the far sky. I look at them not with criticism, only with wonder. I painted the first aeroplane pictures in August 2001. Then I stopped for a while, because I did not want it to seem as if I were ‘updating’ things. That has always been far from me. Now too. I have never selected my pictures on a thematic or theoretical basis, but always on optical and emotional grounds.”/6.
In his account of the exhibition Parkok és repülők (Parks and Aeroplanes), held in 2011 at the Pelikán Galéria in Székesfehérvár, the art historian Lajos Lóska, writing about the recurring aeroplane motif that appears from picture to picture in the new millennium, observed: “Later, aeroplanes of awe-inspiring scale follow automobiles, capturing the painter’s imagination even more than cars. Whether these aircraft rest on the ground, fly among the clouds, or hover above the landscape, they act primarily through their monumentality; they are not ultramodern machines personifying technology, but rather living beings resembling enormous animals, giant sperm whales (Víz alatti repülők [Underwater Aeroplanes], 2001; Égi bálna I. [Sky Whale I], 2009). The painting Óriás lények találkozása (Meeting of Giant Creatures, 2008), in which an aircraft the size of a Gothic cathedral is visible, expresses this homage to monumentality well. The ant-sized people swarming around it only heighten the sense of enormity.”/7.
Just as genres – landscape, cityscape, genre scene, portrait – and painterly themes, along with the concrete motifs that animate them and refer to so-called reality, have no decisive significance in this painting, so too meanings and fields of meaning do not fit into our customary, convention-sustained system of symbolism and metaphor. For the motifs, switching off transfers and connections, neutralising associative arcs, and radically rewriting content and semantic resonances signify only themselves. This stripping away of customary meaning – this deprivation of symbolic (iconographic) reference – is one of the most essential characteristics of Szotyory’s painting: the revelatory effect of things being pared back to themselves, becoming themselves again, and being saturated with new, personal emotional durations. Through this, unexpected attractions and repulsions may arise in our receptive sensations – ambivalences that reinterpret earlier ideals and qualities. The source of all this is the creative intention, which, a few years earlier, in 2015, in connection with his exhibition Szépek és félelmetesek (Beautiful and Fearsome), could be cited as the artist’s ars poetica: “For me, beauty is always shattering, and what is overwhelming is always frightening too. These feelings go together in my case. Only these things, only these experiences ever compel me to paint. Irony, for example, or a critical attitude – never. Thus I can say that in these combined feelings, and so in every one of my pictures, I reveal an admiration, a longing for something beautiful, and an attraction to what is a little shiveringly fearsome too. And this applies to every landscape in my pictures, to cars, cypresses, aeroplanes, and every building and every creature. … Painting fulfils the function in my life of conjuring up my desires through a painterly magic.”/8. In other words, there is nothing speculative, theoretical, or a matter of artistic ‘trick’ here: Szotyory’s works are traditional panel paintings, with identifiable generic frames and describable painterly means, and with clearly outlineable stylistic traits and characteristics, through which painterly desires are fixed, human intensities and moods are concentrated, and the hedonism of paint applied to canvas takes bodily form in its material reality.
Within an apparently regular order of form and within frames that may be called traditional, the artist undertakes to unfold an extraordinarily strange, incandescent, deeply emotional, tense painterly terrain – and thereby sets before us his mystical realist world. Despite thematic and generic diversity, Szotyory’s works form a unity: the unifying traits include a mode of depiction that avoids over-detailing; a generally dark palette imbued with glimmering, suggestive lights; the dizzying, unclosed vistas opening into infinity; the soft, gentle, almost shadow-like handling of pictorial elements, motifs and forms – and the intense atmospheric radiation of all these.
(As a seemingly incidental thread connecting the works, one might note the frequent appearance of paired motifs: the two Indian girls, the two wolves, the two bloodhounds, the two lions, and the two aeroplanes.) Beyond this, in deeper content-regions, what unifies this body of images is a devotion to beauty and a sense of being shaken by it – a sensation that takes form in distance, exoticism, monumentality, strength, dignity, mystery, the unfamiliar tinged with otherness, the almost unattainable: in the strange. In that strangeness which the painter creates by turning the image into a wish-image: by summoning a fragment of so-called reality in an unusual way, far removed from the everyday; by marking out daring viewpoints; by unexpected emphases; by the confident, broad-stroked presentation of beings and objects endowed with heightened emotion; and by the dormant tension of unpredictable phenomena. In Szotyory’s paintings, the Indian girl – and (after 11 September 2001) the aeroplane, the dog, the wolf, the lion, the palm tree, and the skyscraper are never symbols; it is never the symbolic connotations of these motifs that are primary or important, but rather that they are the beings, objects and manifestations of sensuous longings. Our interpretive questions, too, must be formulated – and our conclusions drawn – by considering why ‘the mysterious object of desire’ is precisely what it is. Our conclusions in the search for artistic motives – beyond the familiar references to the hopeless, dispiriting nature of actual reality – may guide the viewer towards spheres of romantic intensity, longings for distant worlds, happiness-seeking coloured by naiveté, and latent sensuality, as if offering a solution promising physical and spiritual consolation. More than a decade and a half ago, the aesthete László F. Földényi, opening Szotyory’s exhibition at the Kiscelli Museum, remarked: “The gentle violence that distinguishes Szotyory’s painting is intended to awaken longing in the viewer. But in such a way that the object of that longing also ensnares the viewer. The result is a dialogue formed between image and viewer, which in Szotyory’s best pictures seems unclosed. This is achieved through the subtly applied aerial perspective, which makes the mood of the paintings elusive, while spatial perspective too awakens a sense of infinity. Szotyory’s paintings seem like windows through which infinity itself glimmers, or doors through which one can step out of space and reality.”/9.
Of course, it is not only the broadly graspable lesson and message of Szotyory’s pictures – that beauty is breathtaking, frightening, and renders us defenceless and exposed – but also that some hitherto unknown beauty has been discovered and placed before us, and that through the windows of this painter’s pictures we may at any time look out into the fearsome world of beauties beyond reality, and through the doors of his pictures we may at any time step out – or in. It depends solely on us whether we yield to the temptation of the sensuous spectacle presented through these windows, whether we look out, and whether we cross the doors thrown wide by these paintings. Yet we should be cautious: this transparency, this passage between our grey world and Szotyory’s fearsome world, luxuriating in painterly beauties, is not without obstacles – not entirely, not uncloudedly free. In the course of our receptive wanderings – in the footsteps of great Hungarian painterly predecessors such as Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, Lajos Gulácsy and István Farkas – we inevitably become entangled in the fetters of mysticism and transcendence.
Éva Mónika Horváth, curator, aptly formulated the essential consequences of Szotyory’s painting and its embeddedness in its time in the introductory study to the catalogue of his 2019 exhibition at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest): “… The desire-driven world, alongside ancient analogies, increasingly dominates the present as well. Craving, ritual and longing weave through and stimulate our consumerist everyday lives. While painting, Szotyory renounces the insatiability awakened by our eternally hungry sense of lack, the constant longing and its direct consequence: unbridled consumption. That which is nothing other than the unhappiness of unsustainability, the enormous waste and futility we perpetrate. On his canvases, it is by no means a paralysing melancholy that is present. Indeed, taking all this into account, his painting also functions as a momentum directed towards a more cheerful, perhaps happier future.”/10. One may hope that the elemental impetus of Szotyory’s painting – carrying forward the figurative, mystically suggestive traditions of twentieth-century Hungarian pictorial art, born under the spell of fearsome beauties – will not be extinguished by the increasingly intensifying crisis phenomena in so-called reality and art in our contemporary twenty-first century.
Notes
/1. László Szotyory: Bevezető. Szotyory László festőművész kiállítása. (lit. Introduction. Exhibition of painter László Szotyory.) Budapest, 1991, Stúdió Gallery. (Catalogue)
/2. Tibor Wehner: A helyzet látszólag. Szotyory László festőművész kiállítása. (lit. The Situation, Seemingly. Exhibition of painter László Szotyory.) Új Művészet, 1991, no. 11, pp. 60–61
/3. János Géczi: Szotyory László. (lit. László Szotyory.) In: Olaj/vászon. Budapest, 1997, Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest), p. 282
/4. Katalin Keserü: Tájkép és táj-kép Bukta Imre művészetének kialakulásában. (lit. Landscape Painting and Landscape-Image in the Formation of Imre Bukta’s Art.) In: Tihamér Novotny – Tibor Wehner: A Szentendrei Vajda Lajos Stúdió (lit. The Vajda Lajos Studio of Szentendre). Szentendre, 2000, p. 245
/5. Katalin Keserü, ibid., p. 245
/6. László Szotyory’s note on aeroplanes. (Manuscript)
/7. Lajos Lóska: Parkok és repülők. Szotyory László kiállítása. (lit. Parks and Aeroplanes. Exhibition of László Szotyory.) Új Művészet, 2011, no. 6, pp. 20–21
/8. Tibor Wehner: A félelmetes szépség. Szépek és félelmetesek: Szotyory László kiállítása. (lit. Fearsome Beauty. Beautiful and Fearsome, Exhibition of László Szotyory.) Karinthy Szalon, until 13 November 2015. Új Művészet, 2015, no. 11, pp. 46–47
/9. László F. Földényi: Bevezető. A vágyódás festészete. Szotyory László művészetéről. (lit. Introduction. The Painting of Longing: On the art of László Szotyory.) In: Exhibition of painter László Szotyory. Budapest, 1999, Municipal Gallery – Kiscelli Museum. (Catalogue)
/10. Éva Mónika Horváth: Bevezető. A szépség könnyei. Szotyory László festőművész kiállítása. (lit. Introduction. The Tears of Beauty. Exhibition of the painter László Szotyory.) Budapest, 2019, Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest). (Catalogue)
[2024]