Inferno is hot by man
(Part of the text about the new series of Csaba Fazakas)
Csaba Fazakas’ pictures leave little doubt concerning the fact that during their creation the creator was in a very intense physical and emotional state. The pictures ooze with a special atmosphere: the artist grapples with his own, rather unsettling world. The pictures leave no doubt either that they represent the details of social, human relationships that lends itself to accurate description, even support by emotions, by experiences. And no doubt that they are relevant! The judgment that we see reflected in the works does not seem unfounded. The amorphous remains of a limited world capable of writing, reading, thinking in terms of clear concepts only with great difficulty, and heartrenderingly. And that is not always a funny thing to do: the individual struggles hopelessly to exceed his own limitations.
That struggle goes back to the times when the mission of art itself was launched, even if it is done by deploying different amounts of a variety of accessories.
A weird feature of these painted works is that the question What is man like? is not posed at this point yet. And why? Because Csaba Fazakas is much too busy answering Who is man? And before the solution of the primary problem is found it would be risky to take the fact and the content for granted by unfolding a detail, a moment of secondary importance: the question of the `what-is-it-like`.
Man can be a variety of types. As long as he is, he exists. On purely stylistic grounds we can state with safety that Csaba Fazakas is assisted in answering the question precisely by what his education in Bucharest, Vienna, Austrian actionism, and new expressionism could give him. It is not without an example if we expected the phases of evolution returning to zoological directions in these landscapes of art historical value.
...
It seems that Csaba Fazakas has, in his art, chosen the parameters not opposed to the experience of periodic behaviour of biological evolution. These point toward the loss of predictability. In his recent oeuvre the chains of figures, suggesting a tendency for ornamentation indicate, apart from a more detailed observation of chaotic movements, also the intensification of indecision. The sequence of phenomena is particularly sensitive to the state of departure. And that – as we have pointed out – is related to the phenomenon of instability.
Such absurd ideas are not useless! They keep taking us back over and over to reality whose re-creation is performed by the artist by his often strange methods.
The content of this reality-reconstruction comes from the underlying figures and illustrations while the possibility of moving away from the sight gives the form. A photograph rarely reveals depth, and the arbitrariness of vision is rarely identical with the indecency of the mirror.
Csaba Fazakas` pictures formulated in black and white reduction, in shades of grey tell of underlying, mysterious events of multiply screened realities. It does not include attributes of historic ages, and thereby it deprives itself of the option of matching the needs of existence to the modern apparatus of satisfying needs with irony. What is left is reticence, and powerlessness, effective even without attributes. The utterances of autonomous value of painting and drawing solved in gestures, and which pries into the essential structures of existence. A live fish picked out of the sea in the hands of a figure who could even be a fisherman, estrangement following procreation by bodies united just a second earlier, and the known-unknown world of lush instincts, feverish desires, high beds at low ebbs. These are more than just human dimensions! The universally valid correlations of assimilation, metabolism, osmoses, and turgor pressures, among which a feature suggestive of a human, or his relationships seem almost incidental.
Tamás Aknai
Art historian
(Part of the text about the new series of Csaba Fazakas)
Csaba Fazakas’ pictures leave little doubt concerning the fact that during their creation the creator was in a very intense physical and emotional state. The pictures ooze with a special atmosphere: the artist grapples with his own, rather unsettling world. The pictures leave no doubt either that they represent the details of social, human relationships that lends itself to accurate description, even support by emotions, by experiences. And no doubt that they are relevant! The judgment that we see reflected in the works does not seem unfounded. The amorphous remains of a limited world capable of writing, reading, thinking in terms of clear concepts only with great difficulty, and heartrenderingly. And that is not always a funny thing to do: the individual struggles hopelessly to exceed his own limitations.
That struggle goes back to the times when the mission of art itself was launched, even if it is done by deploying different amounts of a variety of accessories.
A weird feature of these painted works is that the question What is man like? is not posed at this point yet. And why? Because Csaba Fazakas is much too busy answering Who is man? And before the solution of the primary problem is found it would be risky to take the fact and the content for granted by unfolding a detail, a moment of secondary importance: the question of the `what-is-it-like`.
Man can be a variety of types. As long as he is, he exists. On purely stylistic grounds we can state with safety that Csaba Fazakas is assisted in answering the question precisely by what his education in Bucharest, Vienna, Austrian actionism, and new expressionism could give him. It is not without an example if we expected the phases of evolution returning to zoological directions in these landscapes of art historical value.
...
It seems that Csaba Fazakas has, in his art, chosen the parameters not opposed to the experience of periodic behaviour of biological evolution. These point toward the loss of predictability. In his recent oeuvre the chains of figures, suggesting a tendency for ornamentation indicate, apart from a more detailed observation of chaotic movements, also the intensification of indecision. The sequence of phenomena is particularly sensitive to the state of departure. And that – as we have pointed out – is related to the phenomenon of instability.
Such absurd ideas are not useless! They keep taking us back over and over to reality whose re-creation is performed by the artist by his often strange methods.
The content of this reality-reconstruction comes from the underlying figures and illustrations while the possibility of moving away from the sight gives the form. A photograph rarely reveals depth, and the arbitrariness of vision is rarely identical with the indecency of the mirror.
Csaba Fazakas` pictures formulated in black and white reduction, in shades of grey tell of underlying, mysterious events of multiply screened realities. It does not include attributes of historic ages, and thereby it deprives itself of the option of matching the needs of existence to the modern apparatus of satisfying needs with irony. What is left is reticence, and powerlessness, effective even without attributes. The utterances of autonomous value of painting and drawing solved in gestures, and which pries into the essential structures of existence. A live fish picked out of the sea in the hands of a figure who could even be a fisherman, estrangement following procreation by bodies united just a second earlier, and the known-unknown world of lush instincts, feverish desires, high beds at low ebbs. These are more than just human dimensions! The universally valid correlations of assimilation, metabolism, osmoses, and turgor pressures, among which a feature suggestive of a human, or his relationships seem almost incidental.
Tamás Aknai
Art historian
