ROMA-ANG C.5227A

Szolnok- Róma katalógus szövegei / angol ford.

Bognár

January 15, 1998

- You have been making paintings of your studio for eleven years. Last autumn you had a great exhibition in Budapest. As it's said, it's time for reckoning.

- Reckoning in the sense that I have beenmat. Why do I use the square? I know one answer: a segment of the secret. This is the most abstract format. Even the two main directions, horizontal - the horizon - and vertical - the gravity - are neutralized, the whole sight becomes nearly abstract. An abstract theme has no delicate dimensions, there are no such things that there must be some space on the right for a little foal. It's funny that I didn't use this format when I painted abstract. They say, I know this size by heart, with eyes closed. There are some two hundred cemetery- and studio-paintings of this size.

- There was a year when, at Kecskemét, where you spend a month with intensive work, you didn't use the square-format...

-Yes.

- And, though you are always ready to destroy your pictures, you had mercy on these.

- On four out of twelve. There was an other problem there. They had become thin and empty, their technique was not good. And mainly: colouring took a direction that recurs every 5 or six years, and I don't want this. When I mix limp violets and pinks with warm white. But pink is my best colour though I scorn it. The colour of slips and panties. But in my best paintings it always comes out: Yes, love. Around 1960 I painted a street in Tihany, in this I managed to put a red and an orange side by side. Since then I have been trying to repeat this, but I can't. I threw the picture out long ago.

- Was it bad anyway?

- Of course. There are colours in which I feel at home. For example I use browns securely, but this is suspicious. It was said twenty years ago that it was easier to paint dark pictures. That's true. And there are the forms... They're troublesome, too. Usually I arrange rectangles side by side. If you think of a jungle-landscape, you feel the contrast, you can see how meagre my world is... I hardly ever use curved lines. What makes the whole thing work is the system of proportions, form is not interesting.

- Casually you mentioned technique. What could be changed here?

- Much, and I know this very well. After ten years I tried to paint with a brush. So far everything I did with a brush had been erased immediately.

- Rubbed with a cloth?

- Yes, I have left nothing of brushness. I see it doesn't work, at the time being. Thirty years ago my master, Gyula Sugár told me to change the technique if I wanted to change my art. Paint squatting, he said.

- Is it a technique?

- Yes, of course. You look at the picture in a different way. And you get tired sooner. I saw in his studio that he fixed a reed on his brushes, so they were fifty centimetres long instead of twenty.

Incredibly wise advice. You asked about technique. With my first paintings the most exciting thing was to invent a technique. I sharpened saw-blades to make a series of palette knives. For thirty years I've been carrying them everywhere and never use them.

- Haven't you ever used palette knives since then?

- No, although I would like to, very much.

- But on Coloured Studio you can well see marks of the palette knife.

- What you can see are the traces of priming. These are known marks but random at the same time.

The picture was painted with fingertip and cloth. I started doing this about 10 or 12 years ago, so I didn't notice it. And then I suddenly realized how spotless my brushes were... oh, really, I haven't been using them for years. So the shapes have become softer. No sharp contours... the picture is soft and foggy. A room can be painted so that you feel it right under your very nose, or as if it were ten metres ahead. Mine are distant. They are far from you. Funny, this rarely happened with my non-figurative pictures. Perhaps these dull, tired colours, tending towards monochrome, are dusky lights... I am romantic, but I keep working against this. It's hard to bear my sentimentality, it's a burden.

- So, although you are a romantic type, you're trying to get away from this with full force. Does this mean that all those things that you don't want to give way to in your life, that you suppress with discipline, I mean you indulge in these things when painting?

- Yes, maybe. I don't know what can get over the stage, here I am necessarily deaf. Perhaps nobody would notice I am romantic if I painted the same themes in whites. The Jewish cemetery pictures and the studio pictures may be looking for a space where I would like to live... like a cat, to find my place.

I can't even think of living anywhere else, moving house, it's just horrifying. About twenty years ago, out of wooden boards I built a two-metre nook in my studio and I happily lived in it for a couple of years. There was an English dictionary, a table, a foot-warmer and my bed.

- Your pictures are sometimes very spacious and sometimes you narrow them down, only a bed...

- While working I only pay attention to the picture and not to the spaces, the furniture, that is, the theme. I potter away months with spots. Many wouldn't believe that I don't have a vision of the painting in advance. And I have no idea what the sight will be three minutes later. I always look for an escape, out of the fallen-in mine, between two rocks. My work has much of chance. First I draw the picture and find an initial pair of colours, usually a brown and a grey but I don't begin with these. The priming I use absorbs the first layer of paint and, with a piece of cloth I rub off the rest, so only a pale "print" is left. Now I have the forms and I only have to care about the colours. I put one on, no good, wipe it off. Repeat a few times, until I get at it. In the meantime the colour-contours change a little bit, get richer, nobody can notice this, but the picture becomes fifty times fuller, more substantial. The difference can be explained if you imagine the same made out of colour paper, applied in the picture. How empty it would be with sharp, scissors-cut contours.

- We have already mentioned theme, format, colour, technique, spot-rhythm, but not light.

- Light flashing through the window. Cheap thing. The ceapest of my tools. I've learnt to paint my sand-papered studio window, you can see that you can't see anything, you can't see out of that window. People want something to be seen there, at least a poplar tree. Unthinkable. For the lack of something better, light appears in the window, then it is reflected on the floor, like theatre spot-lights. I really feel ashamed.

- In the Contemporary Art Museum there is your nine-panel, several metres high icon-wall. It's characterized by projected light. dark brown, empty walls, hardly any furniture. You condemn this as cheap, pretentious. Critics say these are your best pieces.

- Well, I think it's theatricality. Literature. Not painting. The lonely painter in his desolate studio. Look at the reviews. Painting is when two colours are put next to each other and they explode. Two small things fixed together and so this is atomic bomb.

- Anyway, these paintings have been made and the Contemporary Museum chose them...

- Yes. These pictures were the same, I kept them in one crate, down there, on the left. I was showing them to friends, and, in an inspired moment, I noticed that together they have a different effect. I yielded to the temptation.

- And didn't you accept it afterwards?

- I did, but it's cheap. Cheap. And now I'm able to say so. A serial always contains a danger: its parts lose their earnestness, their independence. When a girls' class marches in front of you and you can only see a group and not the individuals. I failed here, but I stand for thiese pieces. They should be taken apart if I had the inner strength. They are impressive as they are. Big picture, big artist. Dramatic. I've never been good at dramatic tones, except for one or two pieces, only at lyric, sentimental. This comes out in my pictures shamelessly.

- And also in the titles.

- That was infantile disease. Very revealing. A Story about Silence, White Angel, Speak Softly, Walk with You.

- You partly denied this in your book. There you said titles are always random.

- The two are not contradictory. There I wrote that titles were given afterwards. When the picture is ready I have to face something new in myself because that's me, too. Then I find a simile in my world. For example, the word jeweller.

- But not always...

-Nearly always. It was a rare exception when I painted a programme picture, the Calvary-serial, Siena-Paris.

- And there is Avignon Lovers...

- Yes. That one had a preconception without which I wouldn't have been able to make it, but it was probably wrong to write the story and publish it. This is a good abstract picture. To paint a girl in love - it's a private affair. The story doesn't belong to it, it should work without the story. Then a colleague warned me about my titles and I realized he was right. Later I knew but I didn't have the courage to admit to myself. It was a mistake to give lofty, sentimental titles. Now, with the haughtiness of minimal art, I give my pictures dry, monotonous titles. Now they have the word studio, earlier there was old Jewish cemetery. This a cheap game, too.

- Theme: cheap. Dark picture: cheap. To keep to brown and grey, at which you're the best and which you can do the most easily: cheap. To reflect the light of the window on the floor: cheap.You have been beating around cheapness pretty well. Anything about "dearness", values?

- There is nothing to say about them, they are always wonders. I can't control them. A work in progress: total defencelessness. It depends on nothing, on chance. Colour is a little bit different, and the picture is about something completely different. The result is a series of quests, experiments. This morning... I have a rather nice piece, I was working on it this morning. In the middle of it there is a small carpet. And, so as not to be boring, I got a stupid idea, to give one third of the carpet a different colour. So far so good. The picture got together in colours, and all morning I kept changing this one third. Beautiful moments came, one after the other, and I saw it was harmonic, it was all right and it didn't make any sense, it comically had no meaning at all. Can you understand that? I don't know if I will ever find a colour that fits in its place, and, moreover, by this one every other colour fits their own place. Maybe an intensive or strange one, so the whole picture gets this colour, or,on the contrary, another solution can be that this one melts into the painting anonymously... I have no idea what will happen...

- How do the audience and the critics justify what you do? You've just had an exhibition. I did not read reviews or the visitors' book but a lot of pictures were bought and this is important because you make a living from this. Can it be defined which pictures are the most sought after?

- Oh, I have never thught about it. Selling a picture is a very complicated story, full of inner shoutings, struggles, whether my work gets to a good place etc., until I decide, calm down, arrange, perhaps cheer up... And it happens with every piece, in different circumstances. So I've never had the chance to remember which pictures they like. And it is not interesting, anyway.

Péter Nádas

October 1997

Tableau d'intérieur, the simplest possible, the image of an inner space. Of a studio, of a soul. Of something within the big house, but outside the body. Below, above, beside, we don't know where. An eye that is present everywhere, that kindly sees us through life...

A corner of a room yawns at me with its diverging lines. Apart from the title nothig says it is a studio.

A dead picture on the wall, blind mirror. No darkness, although no light comes from anywhere. And just that, the opening yawn of the corner becomes the most obtrusive, the most erotic gesture: it recieves me, it takes me upon itself. What is more, it draws me onto the diagonally placed bed. I will be laid out here. The sheet glows over the greys and blacks. On the bed, between bright layers of paint I can see remains of my past, hours of love, vanish and varnish. But the horizontal and vertical lines, which used to hold everything together so securely, are diverging after a hundred years.

Péter Esterházy

October 1997

...Váli's painting: the place where we are now. Nowhere on earth outside th

painting this theme for more than ten years. Everybody, my friends, my swimming instructor at the Lukács Bath, say I should quit at last. They have had enough of this theme. But theme is a third-rate problem. The only real question is if quality declines or not. I think it does. But at present I can't see any serious reason to change.

- Anyway, the whole thing is quite asymmetric, at least according to the periodization which can be read in the book that came out simultaneously with the exhibition. You had a fourteen-year long abstract period, then there's been other fourteen years in which you painted two themes: Jewish cemeteries and now your studio - though I wouldn't make such a clear distinction because, in a sense that these are also abstract pictures.

- That's right, however, a young art critic wrote that my non-figurative paintings were still lifes, landscapes in disguise. And, referring to my cemetery-pictures, some friends keep saying that I paint "Jewish studios". Well, the theme is rolling to and fro, like an empty tin can on a ship's deck. I always want to paint the same. Abstract or studio, it's all the same. I don't know what it is - some constellation of colours and shapes. I think in my pictures I look for a secluded spot where I can feel cozy. It may have come from Klee. I remember I was 12 when I saw his Sindbad, and it gave me a shock. Now, if I pay attention, feel the same. That's why I know that the reason for living, the reason for painting, this inner core in me is motionless. That's why I can calmly destroy my bad paintings: my taste wouldn't change. The outline is not the theme - now the studio - but the painter's vision. One could as well paint ashtrays. I have sometimes tried this: I started painting big houses with a wide brush, with bright purple and red - they were awful, I threw them out immediately.

Anyway, the main question: isn't it the lack of discipline not to step forward? A strong impulse, maybe... a great love (goodness!)... or perhaps I should travel to an island, for half a year. But I don't feel like that. Yesterday I managed to arrange not to go to Paris. Yes, of course, I would like to see Paris for a couple of days, but now I don't have the strength to leave home and not to work.

By the way, it's not only the theme but he the size, too, that I left unchanged, though sometimes I really tried. I cannot paint any other size but sixty-by-sixty centimeters. I've hardly ever used others for sixteen years. And this squre-size is universal but defined as well.

- What is universal and what is defined in the square-shape?

- The square isnt logical either for the Jewish cemeteries or the studios, because both are landscapes. If you look at a cemetery in life, there's nothing up: white sky - you can omit that. A landscape needs a horizontal format. That's why it is called landscape-format. Here square is unnatural, nobody uses it. This is the same with the room-theme: up and down, the ceiling and the floor is not so interesting. And a portrait is a tipically vertical for painting this theme for more than ten years. Everybody, my friends, my swimming instructor at the Lukács Bath, say I should quit at last. They have had enough of this theme. But theme is a third-rate problem. The only real question is if quality declines or not. I think it does. But at present I can't see any serious reason to change.

- What is universal and what is defined in the square-shape?

- The square isnt logical either for the Jewish cemeteries or the studios, because both are landscapes. If you look at a cemetery in life, there's nothing up: white sky - you can omit that. A landscape needs a horizontal format. That's why it is called landscape-format. Here square is unnatural, nobody uses it. This is the same with the room-theme: up and down, the ceiling and the floor is not so interesting. And a portrait is a tipically vertical foris. It is not his place but ours. He has managed to do what few 20th century artist managed: to make we out of I ( I deliberately don't use the word "create").

I live in a house which has a picture of Váli. For its sake the house should be rebuilt a little and it brings shame on me and on the world that it can only be interpreted as a joke. On the other hand: the picture has turned my home into one that would miss it.

Dear Miklós,

you asked for a plain, factual autobiography.

Here you are:

born 1942

graduated 1967

first exhibition 1969

individual exhibitions 30

exhibitions abroad 23

oil paintings so far 1307

destroyed 720

in public collections 116

in private collections 392

prizes 21

award 1

children 2

total 8490

Do you think it's enough

And the REAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In August 1983 I found the answer

for the question I asked in May 1951.

Now it doesn't matter how long I will live.

But so far I am on duty.

February 1998

Dezső Váli