Unconventional, singular, mysterious – these epithets apply equally to the career and the works of Miklós Szőcs TUI. This artist did not become a sculptor by following the customary path – indeed, even the word sculptor is difficult to apply, for it denotes something quite different from the orientation and essence of Szőcs’s practice. His trajectory has therefore been decidedly unorthodox: born in 1953, he undertook no academic training, nor did he have masters in the traditional sense. He devised for himself the technical methods for carving his wooden three-dimensional objects and sculptures, and in their outlook, character and mode of existence his works constitute a wholly different category of artefacts – magical objects, rather than the creations of a sculptor or craftsman in the contemporary sense. Art historian Éva Forgács has likewise reminded us of this, observing that the artist is “a creator with a uniquely distinctive profile, pursuing an artistic programme so highly idiosyncratic that it finds its way only slowly to a wider audience, yet its values are unmistakable. His primary concern is the sculptural shaping of wood, in which he is undoubtedly a virtuoso; at the same time, he lives within a cultural milieu in which craftsmanship is considered an anachronism. Szőcs’s fundamental theme is precisely this anachronism: in his works he evokes a cultural condition in which the cultic, ritual and practical functions of plastic art coincide.”
The artist’s sole material is wood: rare, precious species such as rosewood, ebony, Lebanese cedar, mahogany, lemonwood, African walnut, and Turkish hazel, and – during his most recent creative period – ever more prominently the ordinary plywood commonly used in industrial furniture production. The workmanship is always singular, concealing the manner of its making and, in a sense, calling into question the very properties of the material itself. The roots of this wood-working practice – visible to the public since the 1990s through exhibitions – reach back to the 1970s, when the artist produced his first major works: the movable wooden figures for Othelló (Othello) and the curious creatures of Orwell’s Animal Farm. These were followed by the first representations of animals poised on the threshold between the real and the fantastical – Hintaló (Rocking Horse), Zebra (Zebra), Gepárd (Cheetah), and the now emblematic Jaguár (Jaguar). Subsequently came the beds and benches, and later the storage vessels and enigmatic containers – objects which, for lack of a better term, might be described as ‘furniture-sculptures’, animated by fantastical animal forms and uniting functionality with a sculptural character steeped in mystery. Yet to label these carved, glued, pressed, hollowed and polished plywood animal-formed storage vessels and containers is already to be led astray, for it is evident that their practical usability is but a secondary concern: we rarely build solid places of storage for immaterial things. Far more significant is that, from a rigid material intrinsically at odds with any curved spatial shaping, this artist creates forms of extraordinary sensitivity. Through the alternation of convex and concave surfaces, serpentine, tendril-like bodily formations, agitated contour lines, the subtle interlocking of volumes, and the exuberant proliferation of forms that emerge from and absorb one another, he constructs an arrangement of magnificent richness that is, nonetheless, contained within a disciplined unity – a formal order radiating immense calm and grandeur. With the oppositions gently dissolved, the artificial and the organic merge imperceptibly into a harmonious whole. This balanced concord between elements attuned to geometric form and motifs of organic character is governed by a mode of composition that is often centralised and almost invariably symmetrical, as well as by a refined sense of plasticity: there is no faltering of equilibrium; everything stands firm, on steady legs, unshakeable. The rigid structure and weighted masses are counterbalanced by supple outer skins and relief formations that project into space. The animal forms – evoking frogs and turtles, iguanas, and other such creatures – that envelop and organically fuse with the ‘spirit-containers’ raise these object-sculptures, these visions fixed into objecthood, into a realm of timelessness and the mystical sphere.
In contemporary object-based art, within the landscape of present-day sculptural practices, Miklós Szőcs TUI works in complete solitude: his creations have no true counterparts in either Hungarian or international art. This singularity, this autonomy, characterises every dimension of his oeuvre – from the choice and handling of materials, through the technical realisation and the mode of existence of the works, to the underlying artistic ethos that governs them. It is at the intersection and unity of these components that this distinctiveness ultimately culminates. His works are related to modern sculpture only insofar as they appear as tangible objects which, by organising extraordinarily dynamic spatial fields around themselves, inhabit a protected, interior space. Yet the conventional vocabulary applied to interpretation within traditional sculpture – notions of representation, evocation of reality, depiction, or sculptural expression – proves inapplicable here: we find ourselves in the realm of spiritualised bodies, of incarnations of the immaterial. The points of reference for interpreting these works, their sources and analogies, must be sought in archaic epochs, in the unfathomable depths of the past, and in the cultures and philosophies of the East – in Eastern modes of thought, conceptions of existence, and metaphysical traditions. In the closure and openness, the fullness and emptiness, the regularity and irregularity, the reality and fantastical nature, the physical manifestation and spiritual mode of being of Szőcs’s creations – in their contrasts and unities – the struggles and moments of reconciliation of the soul and the consciousness wrestling with the world become embodied, prompting the viewer towards profound, serious contemplation. It is in this very moment that the works’ apparent anachronism, their evocation of and dwelling in the past, transforms into contemporaneity – into a compelling validity, a presence extended across space and time.
To approach the work of Miklós Szőcs TUI, one must begin from afar – indeed, from a very great distance. In his wide-ranging study A modern művészet vízválasztója (lit. The Watershed of Modern Art), the art historian Professor Lajos Németh reminds us that “at moments of crisis in convention, artists seeking new possibilities of visual communication became increasingly receptive to artistic expressions originating outside Europe, or at least untouched by the Greco-Renaissance tradition. This is why they were able to discover primitive and naïve art, which, from the perspective of European art, appeared to be free of convention.” Foremost among these discoverers was Gauguin, who proudly confessed that he reached far beyond the horse of the Parthenon – back to the wooden toy horse of childhood – thus to the primordial, to the origins of things. The reception of Gauguin’s art confirms that a profound artistic shift had taken place: as Dujardin argued almost a century and a half ago, instead of pursuing the illusion of representing nature, one must seek the meaning of things; one must express not their image but their character, concentrating on their essence – as occurred in both primitive and folk art. These artistic traditions – like those of Egypt, Assyria, or Japan – are symbolic, and as such, may serve far more effectively as models for new artistic aspirations than the exhausted development of European art.
Traditional conventions of wood sculpture and the ideal of the carved statue lie far from Szőcs Miklós TUI’s artistic aspirations. His figurative compositions – evoking fantastical beings of the East – and his enigmatic object-sculptures are works shaped with extraordinary ingenuity and executed through painstaking labour, unified by an autonomous formal logic. Yet the divergences that sharply distinguish his oeuvre from both contemporary and modern sculpture arise not only from methods of execution or formal characteristics: the very position and mode of existence of a work by Szőcs are fundamentally different from those of an ordinary modern sculpture displayed in a gallery or stored in a collection. The works created in the latter half of the 1990s and in the years following the turn of the millennium permeate and organise space in a distinctively unusual manner: they appear as masses enveloped by closed and open surfaces, by mantling forms; as bodies animated by projections and recesses that move away from and return to a central core; as exciting configurations composed into a central, symmetrical order arranged along a vertical axis. In the tensions and resolutions between interior and exterior, enclosure and openness, fullness and hollowness, geometrical and organic forms, correspondences and divergences – in the sublime vertical ascents and dignified horizontal extensions, in the play of light and shadow, of radiation and reflection – transcendence itself is brought to life. In these works, one might say, the yearning of consciousness and spirit for repose contends with an unappeased agitation.
Art history and aesthetics generally undertake the description and interpretation of works of art, engaging in their comparison with the phenomena of the world. In the case of Szőcs Miklós TUI’s profound, complexly symbolic and enigmatic works, let us confine ourselves to an attempt at description, to that level of characterisation which necessarily operates amid uncertainties; and upon reaching the stage of interpretation, let us shift into the conditional mood, formulating questions rather than assertions. Only thus can we preserve that severely constrained, subdued sense of freedom suggested by his works.
[2015]