Music and Picture
The paintings presented here consist of the works of the past two years. Their focal point stands in the synesthetic relationship of music and visuality, a problem which interested me to a great extent already in my earlier works. For me, the movements and changes in musical harmonies, rhythmic patterns, and dynamics often evoke the experience of a complex, spatial structure of light. By a close parallel, this might perhaps, at best be likened to a perfect crystal structure, which in accordance with the composer’s intentions, and hence with the musical content itself, is in constant change, inviting the listener, who at the same time becomes a viewer as well, to interact and to enter its space.
In this exhibit the person of Béla Bartók, and his composition for orchestra and double choir, the Cantata profana, has received a highlighted role. This particular work has served as the main motive for the greater thematic series that comprises the core of the presented material. In the studies, which I have named ’preludes’, besides experimenting with transparent spaces of light I ventured to find the type of mood, or way of expression, the actual language, that best suited the later, greater paintings of the series. The capstone of the series came to be a triptych, secretly perhaps also guided by the intention that Bartók’s original idea about a greater unity, consisting of a tripartite series with Cantata profana as its opening piece, should this way become a reality. Other works in the collection present portraits of a line of, mostly, classical musicians. The portraits, with the intention of being more than mere reflections of a particular personality, in their organised system comprise of a spatial web of dots and circles. As such, they gently open the non-existing gates of a personalized energy state, and furtherly, those of a limitless space, and thereby return home in its unity as illusions appearing in a mirror, and melt up in the crucible of its endless, compassionate peace.
Gábor Winkler-Nemes
