Born in 1965 in Zenta, in the Vojvodina (Vajdaság) region, into a family of physicians, painter György Verebes completed his primary and secondary studies in his hometown during the 1980s. After concluding his studies in graphic art, he obtained his degree from the Budapesti Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian University of Fine Arts). Following a brief period of activity as a graphic artist – later also as an applied graphic designer – his artistic focus gradually shifted from 1988 gradually towards painting. Concluding the phase of portrait drawing pursued as a means of livelihood in Hungary and Sweden, Verebes began, in the 1990s, to lay the foundations of a wide-ranging oeuvre encompassing multiple artistic fields and disciplines. Alongside painting, his work as a composer, performing musician and concert pianist gained increasing significance; at the same time, his artistic legacy also includes notable achievements in illustration, stage design and interior architecture. An organic component of this multifaceted career is his theoretical activity: over the years, he has published numerous studies and writings on art in journals and various magazines. Within this remarkably active body of work – marked by extraordinary energy and prodigious capacity for labour – artistic and public engagement likewise plays an important role. This includes the leadership of artists’ colonies, as well as the devoted fulfilment of responsibilities within various local – particularly Szolnok-based – and nationally active artistic associations and foundations. Yet among these many diversified pursuits, painting remains, without question, the most important and defining field of his creative activity.
Maintaining close ties with his hometown of Zenta to this day, painter György Verebes had his painterly oeuvre summarised as follows in the Délvidéki Magyar Képzőművészeti Lexikon (Hungarian Fine Arts Lexicon of Southland, 2007), edited by Valéria Balázs-Arth:
“In his painting, alongside abstract expressionism, he works on fictive historical images. In 2002 he embarked on a painterly programme, creating a series of large-scale oil paintings entitled Alvó titánok (Sleeping Titans). Closely connected to this series, both visually and in terms of its conceptual content, is the series known as Mudrák, likewise realised on a large scale. The intellectual background of these works is formed by the contradiction – or, alternatively, the unity – of the individual–person and individuality–personality. György Verebes’s aim is the artistic transmutation of the most emphatic bodily manifestations of human individuality – the face and the hand – from the individual into the supra-individual, that is, into the personal, and subsequently from the personal into the supra-personal, at which point particular bodily existence is transformed into a symbol and thereby acquires universal meaning. It was for this reason, among others, that he resorted to the gradual enlargement of the scale of his paintings, as well as to the space-forming force of colours and forms that either support or collide with one another.”
Following the graphic compositions of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as his painterly works recording fictive historical scenes, it was from the years around the turn of the millennium when György Verebes started to fully unfold as a painter. The first paintings depicting faces and hands emerged in the 2000s, as products of the Zenta-born artist’s creative period in Szolnok. This recent set of images clearly demonstrates that the painter has come to be concerned almost exclusively with the representation of faces and hands as a means of summarizing and conveying his statements as a painter. The images of faces and hands may be interpreted as closely interrelated serial works; at the same time, this does not preclude individual paintings, when singled out from the ensemble, from standing before us as independent, fully accomplished works in their own right. The interconnections presupposing a serial character are confirmed – beyond the shared subject matter or motif – by both format and technique. The paintings of faces and hands are oil compositions on canvas, executed in regular formats in accordance with the spirit and practice of classical pictorial methods, manifesting in vertical and horizontal rectangles or square formats.
The most important art-ensembles created by György Verebes, which equally characterise both the overt and the concealed painterly visage of his art – the series titled Alvó titánok (Sleeping Titans) and Mudrák – may tempt us to assume that, yielding to our urge to categorise, we might place these works among contemporary artistic reflections of the real world, as particular manifestations of realist or neo-realist modes of vision and stylistic aspiration. Nevertheless, here we are, dealing with something entirely different. The motifs of Verebes’s paintings – faces, faces with closed eyes, and hands – do not depict; they signify. This meaning takes form in the dreamlike quality of the images, in a state of dream-intoxication that distances them from reality and draws them closer to the realm of the surreal. “Dream imagery is typically composed of ordinary images and memories of wakefulness,” the painter observes. “The memory of existing within a body is also such a memory, because it is one. Every present moment is the memory of the previous moment. This is how awareness is constructed – it is like a comet that has no body, only a tail, and it drags a tail of memories behind itself.” In a similar way, the artist’s reflections on the gaze of closed eyes also guide us toward a kind of underlying reality – and this is no paradox – as articulated in one of his meditations: “The gaze is unequivocal; the closed eye is an enigma. Who is behind it? And what does it see? Where there is an eye, there is vision, because vision created the eye. Behind closed eyelids, I can glimpse the moment of creation – that of vision – before there was an eye. The closed eye belongs to no one and everyone. The world behind the closed eye is outside and inside at the same time. This world belongs to no one and everyone. It is mine even when I no longer have eyes. Behind the closed eye, the seer, the act of seeing, and the thing seen are one.”
Throughout the long centuries of art history, faces and hands have already occupied a privileged position in the works of artists across different periods. Yet both the face and the hand appeared as elements bearing essential messages of the complete figure, the entire organism – that is, as parts of a well-established system, to use a conventional expression: the human body, the human form. In the twentieth century, however, alongside the portrait of the face refined over centuries, the hand also emerged independently, detached from the body, as a concentrated artistic entity in its own right. It is therefore among those faces and hands that condense emblematic and symbolic meanings, that compress an era into metaphor, that we must seek the semantic fields of György Verebes’s images of faces and hands – far beyond the homogeneous domain of naturalistic representation. Yet this inquiry is disrupted by further recognitions: the faces are not human faces, but titan portraits, and the hands are not merely hands, but mudras – that is, representations of ancient Far Eastern hand–yoga gestures.
Thus, through Verebes’s compositions, the closed-eyed Titans and Titanesses of Greek mythology would seem to gaze back at us from the pieces, were they to open their eyes: the second generation of gods, born as the children of Gaia and Uranus, burdened by power, entangled in struggles for domination, and subjected to a fate marked by conflict. The first question that therefore arises is this: why, at the opening of the twenty-first century, does the artist paint the adventurous fates of the mythological figures of ancient Greece – figures cast into depths, mutilated, devoured, liberated from the underworld, and ultimately the embodiments of humanity’s benefactors through their strength and inventions – or rather their imagined portraits? Drawing simplified conceptual conclusions, the answer is evident: it is precisely because of their troubled fate, their frantic struggles, their fight for power, their hopeless defeats and glorious victories – their glorious defeats and hopeless victories – that these symbolic contents, these messages for our present days, these parallels, examples and lessons can be defined and articulated.
Just as in the facial compositions, so too in the case of the mudras the Zenta–Szolnok-based painter invokes motifs of phenomena distant both in time and space: the ritual hand gestures and hand positions of Hinduism and Buddhism, of which there are more than a hundred variants within tantric practices. According to a lexical definition, “within the channels through which life flows in living beings, blockages may arise for psychological and physical reasons. These channels end in gateways located in the fingers, the palms, the feet, the crown of the head and the perineum. Through these gateways, everyone is connected to the infinite energies of the Cosmos. With the help of mudras, we may heal ourselves, gain strength or attain wisdom.” Moving beyond symbolic domains, however – as in these images of hands, and likewise in the images of faces (though not portraits) – and by experiencing their sphere of influence, we may arrive at the psychic forces mediated by the works, at the space of meditation, at an encouragement to turn inward toward our inner self. We find ourselves traversing intangible, unbounded spaces, confronted with faces never seen before, never known (awkwardly seeking eye contact with closed eyes), studying unusual hand positions and gestures in which no familiar movements can be discerned. We may be enchanted by the deep colour tones tending toward darkness, by the strange lights that interrupt their depth; and thus, within these peculiar painterly milieus that bring strange motifs to life and are steeped in sensuousness, we may be touched by the metaphysical, transcendent radiance of existence. Dimly glowing, struggling with uncertainty, mysterious, captivating through their strange beauty, and tenaciously imprinted in memory: such are György Verebes’s works, which, through multiple layers of mediation, reflect upon our own time by confronting us with titan faces and mudra hands. Reduced to a single motif, yet interpreted through a rich and sensitive painterliness, these works aspire to totality while addressing the viewer in an intimate manner. It is in this way that these symbolically charged images of bodily fragments fulfil their vocation and their mission.
Through his versatile, wide-ranging activity encompassing multiple creative fields and his musical practice pursued alongside the visual arts, György Verebes stands as one of the most compelling artistic personalities of contemporary art – a builder of a significant, distinctive and rich-in-values oeuvre. The thoughts he articulated in the Kagylókürt (Conch Shell Horn) conversation conducted by Júlia Kenderesi might as well be regarded as a kind of ars poetica:
“Through my paintings, I would like to convey messages, for which professional credibility is essential. … But to do that, one has to arm oneself. On the one hand, it was necessary to truly learn how to paint, to create images capable of speaking for themselves. I want to paint pictures – and to some extent I succeed – that are the first to be noticed in an exhibition. To achieve this, I use several methods: above all, a kind of classical painterly knowledge, with a function to build trust. If visitors see that someone has worked so much on a painting, then it must surely be important. Important to the painter, and perhaps to the viewer as well. Technical and professional preparedness exists solely for this reason – for credibility. So that the message can get through, and the states that appear in the paintings can become as tangible as possible. Preferably free of redundant embellishment. If someone only explores the professional skills within it, so be it – but I must equip my paintings with this. It is an armament, a toolkit.”
In contrast to the artistic practices of our era, increasingly determined by slovenly, provisional works embodied in materials that inevitably become obsolete or perish, György Verebes’s deeply profound, meaningful creations are sustained by a working method that reflects professional mastery, respect for craftsmanship, and an approach evoking classical traditions.
[2022]