On the Portico of Inferno
About the new series of Csaba Fazakas
Bacchanalia and Dionysia. We are standing on the portico of inferno. Bacchus and Dionysus are tempting Hades: before danse macabre, let’s eat, drink, fornicate. The figures of ancient Greek and Roman mythology came to my mind about Csaba Fazakas’ dramatic pictures, painted in the last one and a half year, only because, talking with him, he gave me the key word: Dionysia. And probably it was also the reason that the nude figures in his works could either fornicate in the antique world. His works have nothing to do with it. The spots and stories of Fazakas’ works refer to the present, their symbolism concerns the reality of today, the collapsing world falling apart. The artist does not lend colour to the tale, his mirror of the era is cruelly sincere. Though the pictures have no titles, the feature of the series is unambiguous. If it had a title, it could be connected with a sentence written by Miklós Mészöly: “Inferno is hot by man.”
The expressivity of the compositions, including figurative, representative elements and abstract marks as well, partly derives from the fact that during creation the automatism of the subconscious is present. The dynamic execution, the windy brushwork produces tension in the painting cardboard, while in the sign of “direct speech” and reduction he applies only black oil paint. The black colour and its numerous shades nearly pulsate in the pictures. He produces the contours of his figures with definite and quick motions on the base. The naked bodies, busts, buttocks and laps are waiting for love-making. Before, during and after the sexual act, they awaken love, satisfy and have a rest. They open up and lock up together. There is not any modesty or fear in them, the way the artist, executing his works, does not keep an eye on the outer world, neither speculate, nor he wants to be liked. These works, bearing the marks of both graphics and paintings, evoke strong emotional effects in the spectators. For sure, some of them will refuse Fazakas’ visions, saying that his works represent love brutally. It is not correct. The way of execution can be brutal, but vision is built on reality. It is not the artist’s matter to be affected. The artist has nothing to do with the confectioner’s shop. Let them go to museums who want to see Cupid’s arrows. He makes live his figures the way he deletes them at the same time. The figures on the white background are painted over and many times they are nearly rubbed out from the picture field. This way the layered, covering drawing, the wildly winding stroke of the brush and line, arising from the soul, becomes more important. Morphology of the line. The brush works quickly on the cardboard, its motion there and back is as swift as a body moves in another body. Many times paint flows thickly. Brooks of the paint are winding, he pours slowly and splashes (drip painting), violent gestures dance. We can see the vibrations of the surface only if we go close to the pictures. We can see tectonic layers and tiny, repetitive motives in this micro-world. It looks as if the surface around the silhouette of the figure got creased wavy, another time delicate motives, shaping a boat or a shield, appear. He transforms the figures, covers them with newer and newer layers, bares parts, makes the white colour shine. The composition is built on the contrast of deep black and shining white, while he makes confront the figurative and abstract parts in one picture field. Sometimes the counterpoint loosens the way the meandering, whirling lines and the strokes of the brush break the figurative element into pieces, the human body itself becomes abstract as well. This body can be stringy, lanky, got thinner to the bones, or can be fat, puffed up, corpulent, suggesting greed. Many times it has got no importance whether the figure is a female or a male. We frequently do not know whom the crescent shaped, tilted, imbecile heads belong to. We do not know whether they wide-open eyes can see any perspective in our world. Sometimes the winged figure, woven from threads, appears as the one-eyed Cyclops. Faces do not belong to eyes in other pictures, only broken lines border them. Figures fall apart. Not even the sexual act can connect them, they are just vegetating at the edge of existence. The thin hands of ghosts are groping for some handrail in the darkness. Sometimes the paint, let it run there and back, binds the figures’ hand and foot, another time it draws a formation like the vascular system onto the dry skin. Loneliness rules over these works.
Beside the sexual act, there is not too much noteworthy happening. Some people eat fish, more precisely: they guzzle. The fish knife is useless on the table, they drop the fish to the mouth by hand. The winged being drops two fish simultaneously. There is nothing angelic character in this winged being. Sometimes a spotted or striped cat appears and steals away, another time a hyena barks at the moon. A snub-nosed, hatted woman just bides her time. However, her companion, with hanging tits and also wearing a hat, falls on another figure’s neck with her legs. In the following work a woman, also sitting around somebody’s neck, is feeding her companion with fish. Nobody cares who they are. Their faces are absolutely unimportant. For example, the face of a man, who is just rummaging around a female genitalia, is completely redrawn the way it looks as if it was a holed mask. Face disappears, soul disappears.
Csaba Fazakas’ last series does not hold out the best hopes for the spectator. However, it is not his duty to make us happy, but his task is to speak precisely about the affairs of the world. Yes, the world is (also) like that. There are people who can declare it, while others hide from truth. From this point of view, from the other side of the table, it seems to me that Fazakas have walked on a long and windy path in order to reach to the present series. It is unambiguous that, over the pubertal, professional training, he has learnt a lot from Mircia Dumitrescu, but it was not enough for him, so he looked for and found other masters. A bit of Picasso’s approach is involved in his works, just like the mentality of the Viennese Arnulf Rainer and Adolf Frohner. And certainly the French Dubuffet, who found out the art brut concept, influenced his activity. The feeling of the naives, which is uncontrollably sincere, is present in his works. On the other hand, that sort of rough, brutal openness and self-manifestation, arising from the hidden corners of the soul, which is partly characteristic of insane and retarded people, is also present. Upon the methodology of the latter approach, many times he tries to forget what he previously learnt, respectively he entrusts this knowledge to the natural automatism of the subconscious. He tries to confront and harmonize these poles. Csaba Fazakas is on the right way. I know it for sure, because it is impossible to walk away before his works of art. They touch us and have an effect on us. They declare and make the spectator think. If it cannot promise redemption, what else could be the task of art?
Csaba Kozák
art historian
About the new series of Csaba Fazakas
Bacchanalia and Dionysia. We are standing on the portico of inferno. Bacchus and Dionysus are tempting Hades: before danse macabre, let’s eat, drink, fornicate. The figures of ancient Greek and Roman mythology came to my mind about Csaba Fazakas’ dramatic pictures, painted in the last one and a half year, only because, talking with him, he gave me the key word: Dionysia. And probably it was also the reason that the nude figures in his works could either fornicate in the antique world. His works have nothing to do with it. The spots and stories of Fazakas’ works refer to the present, their symbolism concerns the reality of today, the collapsing world falling apart. The artist does not lend colour to the tale, his mirror of the era is cruelly sincere. Though the pictures have no titles, the feature of the series is unambiguous. If it had a title, it could be connected with a sentence written by Miklós Mészöly: “Inferno is hot by man.”
The expressivity of the compositions, including figurative, representative elements and abstract marks as well, partly derives from the fact that during creation the automatism of the subconscious is present. The dynamic execution, the windy brushwork produces tension in the painting cardboard, while in the sign of “direct speech” and reduction he applies only black oil paint. The black colour and its numerous shades nearly pulsate in the pictures. He produces the contours of his figures with definite and quick motions on the base. The naked bodies, busts, buttocks and laps are waiting for love-making. Before, during and after the sexual act, they awaken love, satisfy and have a rest. They open up and lock up together. There is not any modesty or fear in them, the way the artist, executing his works, does not keep an eye on the outer world, neither speculate, nor he wants to be liked. These works, bearing the marks of both graphics and paintings, evoke strong emotional effects in the spectators. For sure, some of them will refuse Fazakas’ visions, saying that his works represent love brutally. It is not correct. The way of execution can be brutal, but vision is built on reality. It is not the artist’s matter to be affected. The artist has nothing to do with the confectioner’s shop. Let them go to museums who want to see Cupid’s arrows. He makes live his figures the way he deletes them at the same time. The figures on the white background are painted over and many times they are nearly rubbed out from the picture field. This way the layered, covering drawing, the wildly winding stroke of the brush and line, arising from the soul, becomes more important. Morphology of the line. The brush works quickly on the cardboard, its motion there and back is as swift as a body moves in another body. Many times paint flows thickly. Brooks of the paint are winding, he pours slowly and splashes (drip painting), violent gestures dance. We can see the vibrations of the surface only if we go close to the pictures. We can see tectonic layers and tiny, repetitive motives in this micro-world. It looks as if the surface around the silhouette of the figure got creased wavy, another time delicate motives, shaping a boat or a shield, appear. He transforms the figures, covers them with newer and newer layers, bares parts, makes the white colour shine. The composition is built on the contrast of deep black and shining white, while he makes confront the figurative and abstract parts in one picture field. Sometimes the counterpoint loosens the way the meandering, whirling lines and the strokes of the brush break the figurative element into pieces, the human body itself becomes abstract as well. This body can be stringy, lanky, got thinner to the bones, or can be fat, puffed up, corpulent, suggesting greed. Many times it has got no importance whether the figure is a female or a male. We frequently do not know whom the crescent shaped, tilted, imbecile heads belong to. We do not know whether they wide-open eyes can see any perspective in our world. Sometimes the winged figure, woven from threads, appears as the one-eyed Cyclops. Faces do not belong to eyes in other pictures, only broken lines border them. Figures fall apart. Not even the sexual act can connect them, they are just vegetating at the edge of existence. The thin hands of ghosts are groping for some handrail in the darkness. Sometimes the paint, let it run there and back, binds the figures’ hand and foot, another time it draws a formation like the vascular system onto the dry skin. Loneliness rules over these works.
Beside the sexual act, there is not too much noteworthy happening. Some people eat fish, more precisely: they guzzle. The fish knife is useless on the table, they drop the fish to the mouth by hand. The winged being drops two fish simultaneously. There is nothing angelic character in this winged being. Sometimes a spotted or striped cat appears and steals away, another time a hyena barks at the moon. A snub-nosed, hatted woman just bides her time. However, her companion, with hanging tits and also wearing a hat, falls on another figure’s neck with her legs. In the following work a woman, also sitting around somebody’s neck, is feeding her companion with fish. Nobody cares who they are. Their faces are absolutely unimportant. For example, the face of a man, who is just rummaging around a female genitalia, is completely redrawn the way it looks as if it was a holed mask. Face disappears, soul disappears.
Csaba Fazakas’ last series does not hold out the best hopes for the spectator. However, it is not his duty to make us happy, but his task is to speak precisely about the affairs of the world. Yes, the world is (also) like that. There are people who can declare it, while others hide from truth. From this point of view, from the other side of the table, it seems to me that Fazakas have walked on a long and windy path in order to reach to the present series. It is unambiguous that, over the pubertal, professional training, he has learnt a lot from Mircia Dumitrescu, but it was not enough for him, so he looked for and found other masters. A bit of Picasso’s approach is involved in his works, just like the mentality of the Viennese Arnulf Rainer and Adolf Frohner. And certainly the French Dubuffet, who found out the art brut concept, influenced his activity. The feeling of the naives, which is uncontrollably sincere, is present in his works. On the other hand, that sort of rough, brutal openness and self-manifestation, arising from the hidden corners of the soul, which is partly characteristic of insane and retarded people, is also present. Upon the methodology of the latter approach, many times he tries to forget what he previously learnt, respectively he entrusts this knowledge to the natural automatism of the subconscious. He tries to confront and harmonize these poles. Csaba Fazakas is on the right way. I know it for sure, because it is impossible to walk away before his works of art. They touch us and have an effect on us. They declare and make the spectator think. If it cannot promise redemption, what else could be the task of art?
Csaba Kozák
art historian
The Conqueror the Gates of Heaven
- about Csaba Fazakas’ plate-lithographs -
Is there an easily permeable gate of clouds? And why to open it by force? If we get an entry to the empire of heaven, then where and whom to can we get to? Csaba Fazakas, already indicating in the titles of his series, looks for one of the basic raisings of Existentialism, dated for the end of the first third of the last century, that is he responds to man’s chosen fate. Though, it is true that man is “sentenced to freedom” (Sartre), he has the possibility to choose, but – living with this freedom, blessed by independence – his road leads through the gates
of fear, loneliness, fragility of life toward nothing, toward death. The artist has passed round the same approach in his cycle, On the Portico of Inferno, though in that case he applied the means of painting. Fazakas is an outspoken creator (it is fair if an artist, interpreting reality, is thinking in insulting paraphrases, and does not care that it may hurt the aesthetical, ethical sensibility of the spectator/voyeur), as, filtering through his mentality, he present for us such a world which has nothing to do with our images about the “upper” world, about Paradise.
The present series include 96 drawings (43 are already executed) and there are 28 plate-lithographs in the catalogue. Their sizes are 42x28 cm, some of them are 220x110 cm large. The laconism of the black-and-white colors is loosened by the intermediate phases of transitions and shades. Within the easily marked frames of rectangles, the artist constructs dynamically, there is not any sign of hesitation, while the picture field keeps its balance all the time. Sometimes he works out the whole surface, minutely executes each square centimeter of the picture, another time he lets the background take breath, counterpointing with the spotty, block-like motives. Many a time monochrome fields appear in the picture, but the uninhabited islands, inclusions do not raise the feeling of want in us. At him the lines run away, dance violently, verticals, horizontals and diagonals intersect each other, whirling wildly. They intertwine like wire nets, bind hand and foot, bandage and separate from the other fragments. Sometimes they organically bend like lianas, another time they fall like raindrops, like short lines, in the meantime they separate and join motives. In other cases they function like patterns, unknown punctuation-marks, forgotten hieroglyphs waiting for clue. However, the main character is always one/more massive, amorphous stain/spot, which stretches itself like an amoeba, trying to loosen its own locked feature, but it also can be a rough-and-ready, emblematic human figure. The defenseless, screaming figure can appear in his entirety, having the head, face, eyes, trunk, back, legs, phallus, womb. However, over the genitals, the most important part of the body is the immense loneliness of the hand, the hands. These thin, bony, dried-out hands (often look like animal claws) wait for help, touch, embrace before they would finally waste away. At Fazakas it is not true that “eye is the mirror of the soul”, but rather the creative human hand. There is a vast hunger for love in these pictures. Desire and unfulfilled illusion are present at the same time. Besides the representatives of the collapsing human world, those of animal life appear in the sponged nature in his context. There is a fish/dolphin shape, a dog/jackal and also a lamb/kid still developing in safety in the animal uterus, which can be regarded as a biblical reference, too. The wounded, defenseless human figure (or his detail) is many a time puffy, asymmetrically round (he has nothing to do with the descriptions, known from history /Auswitz-Birkenau/ or literature /Knut Hamsun: Hunger/, as we know that starvation can be manifested in different ways). Another time the figure is locked into a letter H, but in other cases the body is broken like the human spinal column. His way of representation is far from idealized approach, but it is an exact mirror of an age and a diagnosis as well.
It is (also) particular in the art of Csaba Fazakas that he can combine the abstract, non-figurative approach and the figurative representation within a single picture. His series, the Trying to Open by Force the Gate of Clouds, apply the means of automatic writing and that of Tasism and the elements of spontaneity, calligraphy at the same time. He can construct the way that he gives a chance to the suggestion of the given moment, to luck, to the automatism of the subconscious. He works intensively with dynamic elements, composes essentially, directly, loudly in the sign of Expressionism, and the immediate, actual reaction given for the things of the world by the graffities is not far from him. In his works the roughness of Art brut, declared by Dubuffet, is also present, just like the sincere, uncontrolled openness of the insane, retarded people (with whom he professionally dealt), which can be seen in their drawings and paintings. Picasso, Arnulf Rainer and Adolf Frohler can be considered his spiritual predecessors. However, the point is that his activity cannot be mistaken for that of other artists, because he consequently walks on his own way.
Csaba Kozák
art writer
- about Csaba Fazakas’ plate-lithographs -
Is there an easily permeable gate of clouds? And why to open it by force? If we get an entry to the empire of heaven, then where and whom to can we get to? Csaba Fazakas, already indicating in the titles of his series, looks for one of the basic raisings of Existentialism, dated for the end of the first third of the last century, that is he responds to man’s chosen fate. Though, it is true that man is “sentenced to freedom” (Sartre), he has the possibility to choose, but – living with this freedom, blessed by independence – his road leads through the gates
of fear, loneliness, fragility of life toward nothing, toward death. The artist has passed round the same approach in his cycle, On the Portico of Inferno, though in that case he applied the means of painting. Fazakas is an outspoken creator (it is fair if an artist, interpreting reality, is thinking in insulting paraphrases, and does not care that it may hurt the aesthetical, ethical sensibility of the spectator/voyeur), as, filtering through his mentality, he present for us such a world which has nothing to do with our images about the “upper” world, about Paradise.
The present series include 96 drawings (43 are already executed) and there are 28 plate-lithographs in the catalogue. Their sizes are 42x28 cm, some of them are 220x110 cm large. The laconism of the black-and-white colors is loosened by the intermediate phases of transitions and shades. Within the easily marked frames of rectangles, the artist constructs dynamically, there is not any sign of hesitation, while the picture field keeps its balance all the time. Sometimes he works out the whole surface, minutely executes each square centimeter of the picture, another time he lets the background take breath, counterpointing with the spotty, block-like motives. Many a time monochrome fields appear in the picture, but the uninhabited islands, inclusions do not raise the feeling of want in us. At him the lines run away, dance violently, verticals, horizontals and diagonals intersect each other, whirling wildly. They intertwine like wire nets, bind hand and foot, bandage and separate from the other fragments. Sometimes they organically bend like lianas, another time they fall like raindrops, like short lines, in the meantime they separate and join motives. In other cases they function like patterns, unknown punctuation-marks, forgotten hieroglyphs waiting for clue. However, the main character is always one/more massive, amorphous stain/spot, which stretches itself like an amoeba, trying to loosen its own locked feature, but it also can be a rough-and-ready, emblematic human figure. The defenseless, screaming figure can appear in his entirety, having the head, face, eyes, trunk, back, legs, phallus, womb. However, over the genitals, the most important part of the body is the immense loneliness of the hand, the hands. These thin, bony, dried-out hands (often look like animal claws) wait for help, touch, embrace before they would finally waste away. At Fazakas it is not true that “eye is the mirror of the soul”, but rather the creative human hand. There is a vast hunger for love in these pictures. Desire and unfulfilled illusion are present at the same time. Besides the representatives of the collapsing human world, those of animal life appear in the sponged nature in his context. There is a fish/dolphin shape, a dog/jackal and also a lamb/kid still developing in safety in the animal uterus, which can be regarded as a biblical reference, too. The wounded, defenseless human figure (or his detail) is many a time puffy, asymmetrically round (he has nothing to do with the descriptions, known from history /Auswitz-Birkenau/ or literature /Knut Hamsun: Hunger/, as we know that starvation can be manifested in different ways). Another time the figure is locked into a letter H, but in other cases the body is broken like the human spinal column. His way of representation is far from idealized approach, but it is an exact mirror of an age and a diagnosis as well.
It is (also) particular in the art of Csaba Fazakas that he can combine the abstract, non-figurative approach and the figurative representation within a single picture. His series, the Trying to Open by Force the Gate of Clouds, apply the means of automatic writing and that of Tasism and the elements of spontaneity, calligraphy at the same time. He can construct the way that he gives a chance to the suggestion of the given moment, to luck, to the automatism of the subconscious. He works intensively with dynamic elements, composes essentially, directly, loudly in the sign of Expressionism, and the immediate, actual reaction given for the things of the world by the graffities is not far from him. In his works the roughness of Art brut, declared by Dubuffet, is also present, just like the sincere, uncontrolled openness of the insane, retarded people (with whom he professionally dealt), which can be seen in their drawings and paintings. Picasso, Arnulf Rainer and Adolf Frohler can be considered his spiritual predecessors. However, the point is that his activity cannot be mistaken for that of other artists, because he consequently walks on his own way.
Csaba Kozák
art writer
