As can be inferred from the artist’s biography, József Szurcsik received his earliest artistic impulses within the family circle. The strongest influence came from his father, the painter János Szurcsik, a representative of Hungarian fine art who began his career after 1956 and who continues to work to this day. His oeuvre is rooted in a realist approach, most closely associated with the tradition of so-called Alföld (Great Plain) painting. In 2011, when József Szurcsik opened his father’s exhibition at the Neon Gallery in Budapest, he articulated the nature of their human and artistic relationship in the following terms:
“If I calculate correctly, I have known the painter János Szurcsik for some 52–53 years now. His art and personality had an immense impact on the development of my own character, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. This is hardly surprising, since at that time – in his thirties and forties – he possessed the full arsenal of creative energies, working with unceasing artistic desire and undiminished momentum. In his studio, the air and the entire environment were permeated by the scent of turpentine, paint and linen canvas. All those who lived close to him absorbed this atmosphere into themselves.”
Despite the activity and formative influence of his painter father, József Szurcsik pursued his artistic studies as a graphic artist. Between 1980 and 1985 he studied in the printmaking department of the Hungarian College of Fine Arts, followed by a three-year postgraduate masterclass programme. Since completing his studies, his oeuvre has been remarkably complex, encompassing numerous artistic fields, branches, genres and techniques. The multifaceted nature of József Szurcsik’s artistic activity has been captured with particular precision by the art historian Judit Szeifert in the introduction to the concise monograph published in 2014 in the Hungart book series:
“József Szurcsik’s creative process cannot be confined within the framework of a single genre. The term ‘visual artist’ is the most appropriate descriptor for his oeuvre – and this is how he himself defines his practice. Alongside painting, his graphic work is equally significant, and in recent years his sculptural activity has also gained prominence. In addition, he has participated in numerous important interdisciplinary actions and events through his performances… His free movement between individual genres has, on the one hand, generated interactions between different artistic fields within his art; on the other, it can be observed that at different times one or another genre or technique came to the fore. Most often, however, he articulates his ideas simultaneously through several media and artistic disciplines. All this stems from his wide-ranging artistic interests. He engages with all branches of printmaking: he produces lithographs, screen prints, etchings, as well as computer-generated drawings. His stage designs, book designs and illustrations are likewise significant.”
In addition, it is essential to recall the art-pedagogical activity that has accompanied his career throughout: his teaching work at the teacher training college in Eger and later at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, as well as the responsibilities and positions he has assumed within various Hungarian and international artistic organisations.
Working since the late 1980s with traditional panel paintings and graphic works, as well as with unconventional compositions – shaped canvases and spatial, sculptural constructions employing diverse materials and tools (such as steel sculptures worked with plasma cutters and angle grinders) – József Szurcsik initially produced record covers and illustrations, and appeared with actions, performances and musical productions (among others with the Art-Reaktor formation, later with Tapasztalt Ecsetek [lit. Seasoned Brushes]). Despite employing a wide array of media and techniques, he rapidly developed an autonomous visual language, an independent formal system and a distinctive personal style. As he once remarked in an interview: “The construction of humanoid elements, faces and figures assembled in an architectural manner and seen in profile had a precursor: a graphic work from 1986 depicting whispering male profiles arranged in a certain sequence. I created it for the cover of Hangár, a Hungarian literary audio periodical distributed on cassette tape, at the request of my writer friend László Császár, who was living in the Netherlands, while I was still a student.”
Already in his early works from the period of his college studies, walls and enclosed spaces, as well as portraits of strange, characterful figures depicted in profile, make their appearance. The mode of presentation of these motifs is characterised by Egyptian and classical artistic traditions and representational conventions, and these central pictorial elements gain expressive force through the impact of monumentality. The depiction of the figure and the face in profile is the result of a deliberate artistic decision: the side-viewed figure is far more distant, impersonal, alien and inaccessible than one that confronts the viewer directly. At the same time, figures and faces transform into various concrete and abstract forms – buildings, objects, labyrinths, spirals and helices. These formal transformations elevate the concentrated motifs into visual metaphors, in whose evocation the factor of time plays a crucial role: above all in the transformation of the momentary into the timeless, the temporary into the permanent. This, in turn, is closely connected to the recurring visual invocation of early civilisations, classical themes, legends, myths and their protagonists. Within Szurcsik’s art, the wall is the most important medium for the representation of portraiture and the human face. It is a symbol of decisive significance – one that has served as a defining emblem of historical events, intellectual movements and phenomena both in earlier epochs and throughout the twentieth century.
“The wall is a multi-layered motif, evoking a multitude of associations. We spend most of our lives between walls, alone or in company. Who would not know the famous or infamous walls of humanity: the Great Wall of China, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the former Berlin Wall, the Israeli–Palestinian wall. Over the years, the human-faced wall motif has become self-propelled – or more precisely, self-constructing – through continuous permutations. The wall-titans are combinations of a single being; mostly solitary or in pairs, devoid of individuality and personality, they gaze indifferently to the right or left, out of the pictorial space… The indispensable use of perspective renders the wall-built, wall-grown, soulless-eyed humanoids real, monumental and tangible. These strange beings frozen into the wall unite the temporal dimensions of past, present and future in their pitiable state of existence.” Thus characterised Katalin T. Nagy, another monographer of Szurcsik’s oeuvre, the wall-figures of József Szurcsik’s works, which acquire further layers of meaning when they appear as constructed monuments placed within landscapes.
The figures and objects inhabiting this world – evoking Egyptian and classical art, balancing on the boundary between reality and surrealism, and unfolding peculiar monumental effects – explore the phenomena and relationships of power, society and the individual, freedom and captivity. Szurcsik’s works are painted, drawn and modelled visions of a cold, rigid world whose legitimacy is authenticated by the tragic failures of past eras, the alarming phenomena of the present, and the bleak prospects of a future that offers hope only in fearful forms. Whether rendered in vivid colour, monochrome compositions, or through black-and-white contrasts and tonal transitions – sometimes by painterly means, at other times through pure graphic devices – these works, occasionally objectified and stepping into real space, guide their viewers into a harsh, uniform, disturbing world that is nevertheless permeated by a longing for warmth and affection, among its peculiar protagonists and stage-like settings.
In stylistic and formal terms as well, József Szurcsik applies unconventional solutions. Eschewing traditional pictorial forms and formats, he frequently employs the tondo, and later adopts a major achievement of twentieth-century modern painting: the shaped canvas. These compositions, enclosed by irregular contours and alternating convex and concave surfaces, are not only formally intriguing through their relief-like articulation, but also serve as sites of significant conceptual emphasis and often as generators of illusionistic visual effects.
In the closing chapter of the concise monograph on József Szurcsik’s oeuvre published in 2010 in the book series issued by the Ráday Gallery, Katalin T. Nagy art historian summarises the principal lessons of the life’s work. She states that József Szurcsik is one of the most significant and defining figures of the artistic generation that emerged in the 1980s, and that his art cannot be bound to schools, movements or the trends characteristic of the period.
“Due to the mythologisation present in his art and the consistent application of an unmistakable personal system of motifs, his artistic attitude is closely linked to the postmodern sensibility. In his early period, he examines the ambivalent relationship between individual and community, and with his indestructible wall-creatures burdened by excrescences and prostheses, he warns of the distortions of the human nature and the world. The bearer of personality is the face – the faceless human being, the mass individual deprived of personality. The face-being has no personality and is therefore controllable, manipulable and potentially dangerous. Szurcsikian art warns of these dangers. Around the turn of the millennium, the artist increasingly retreats into inner emigration, raising walls, building bunkers and opening soul-passages that traverse the circles of Dante’s hell, as if seeking to atone on behalf of everyone. This tormenting self-consumption comes to an end by the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, and the wall-creatures find refuge in nature as monument-like ruins. Flagellation, atonement and compassion – these are the stages of Szurcsikian art to date.”
Thus, the conclusion may be drawn that József Szurcsik provides an extraordinarily precise diagnosis of the increasingly severe crisis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century humanity, yet offers no direct solutions. It is only the artistic authenticity, inventiveness, suggestive power and disturbing beauty of his works that may afford some measure of hope to their viewers and interpreters.
[2016]