Psychological Truth And Historical Truth in László
Paizs
László Paizs is essentially an expressionist, but he is a
latterday or Neo-expressionist - an expressionist into bleakness rather
than brightness, more aware of the grimness of the world than hoping
for a better world, as both the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artist did,
at least before the first World War. Censored in his own country until
the Communists departed, he cannot help having felt emotionally oppressed
as well as physically threatened. He probably internalized this threat
to his life and art - this crushing social and ideological pressure
to conform. The result - the sense of being a human ruin - is what
we see in his art: it expresses what was inexpressible during the Communist
rule of Hungary. The tragically human figures that we see in Standing
Figure, No. 2, 1999, Double Figure No. 3, 2000 (oil
and colored polyester on canvas), and the even more astonishing King
and Queen I and II, 1999 and 2000 (oil, alploid on canvas), among
many other "burnt figure" works, as they may be called,
are implicitly self-portraits as well as portraits of victimized human
beings - human beings all but destroyed by society and history.
I call them burnt figure works because they have a textural and even
dramatic affinity with the series To the Memory of Book-Burners, 1986
(acrylic block sculpture). In these works history comes ironically
to the fore: when the Communist regime was overthrown, the books of
Marx and Lenin - Communist Bibles - were burnt. It was no doubt a liberating
act - an anti-ideological, forcefully human reaction to an inhuman
regime - but it was also a bizarre echo of the Nazi book-burnings,
carried out as part of a systematic program of ideological enforcement.
Thus the irony of Paizs's "expressive" works - all the more
so because the burnt residue of the books and of the figure is preserved
in plastic as though in amber. The residue becomes the memento mori
of the psychological and historical truth - the artistic trace of personal
and social suffering. Paizs's works are the holy relics of death elevated
in an ironically sacred art.
The series of oil and colored polyester paintings is a sculptural happening;
the shadowy, splattered figures are a kind of abstract expressionist
painting. They are at once flat, fractured, and texturally dynamic,
as though the dynamics of destruction could give them vitality, thus
overturning the loss they embody. The Book-Burners objects are also
about loss - personal loss, as I have suggested, as well as social
and even intellectual loss for Marx and Lenin, whatever brutality they
led to (a brutality reflected in Paizs's works), are part of Europe's
intellectual heritage, just as the more enlightened books the Nazis
destroyed. What makes Paizs an artist - an especially important artist
in these trying times as well as in a Hungary struggling to recover
from decades of identity crisis (until recently, it has always been
part of an empire - the Austro-Hungarian, the Nazi, and then the Soviet
empires) - is that he is able to turn the destructiveness of history
into weirdly sublime beauty. He is able to pursue disintegration to
achieve a new aesthetic integration, even if that integration embodies
disintegration, thus resisting integration into conformist society.
This is what Paizs's works heroically and ironically do, even though
his allegorical figures are heroic ruins, as their antique source suggests.
Paizs's work are about the ruin of the past and the possibilities that
were never realized, even as he suggests that his burnt figure may
be a luminous phoenix rather than a Pompeiian mummy.
Donald Kuspit
Professor of Art History and Philosophy , SUNNY, New York
Noted author, art critic and historian
Catching Up with László Paizs...
When I first saw László Paizs' painting in his studio in Budapest,
Hungary, I felt like an explorer who had made a discovery. The paintings
appeared to be modern day relics of a past civilization, partial figures
excavated with heavy textured polyester and glimmering tones of pink,
silvery and golden hues. I found myself contemplating each work of
art.
After a few steps around the studio I saw an eerie light, a red glow
from embers floating within a block of plexiglass. Upon closer view,
I noticed that they were actually the remains of burned pages of books,
some pages still appearing to be on fire, trapped forever in a clear
acrylic block. This work reflected a moment Mr. Paizs experienced during
the 1956 revolution in front of a bookstore in Budapest. He watched
as classic volumes of Marxist-Leninist books were thrown onto the pavement
and the piles were set aflame. In his words, it conjures the moment
into a 'conscious fossil'.
László Paizs had to "kick against the pricks", to borrow
Ezra Pound's felicitous phrase, since young artists in Hungary were
routinely cautioned by cultural watchdogs against indulging in "petit-bourgeois
pedantry" and straying into the "bog of abstractionism".
Here is a man who has dedicated his entire life to his art and has
had to fight every step of the way to do it.
While U.S. Pop art parodied conspicuous consumerism, Paizs' earliest
plexiglass pieces, created in 1969 and containing items of deconstructed
clothing, poked perilously pointed fun at the shoddy workmanship of
Hungary's state-owned factories. The following year, a powerful plexiglass
piece "Gauze Mushroom Cloud" addressed the threat of nuclear
war from a humanistic, nonpartisan perspective well outside the guidelines
of socialist realism. While much American Pop art of the same period
now seems dated, Paizs' work continues to resonate in a way that once
again, alas, seems disturbingly prophetic. But it has always been a
sign of Paizs' greatness that he never tries to ingratiate himself
to the viewer, neither in his choice of materials or the cold facts
he employs them to convey, as seen in pieces such as "Atomic Cloud
with Dog's Backbone", which makes its point with poignant and
unflinching eloquence.
Indeed, the transcendent qualities of art - its ability to survive
in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, official or othervise,
and finally triumph in the end - is just one of the lessons that one
took away from this important exhibition.
Coming upon the work of László Paizs at this late date is very much
like stumbling upon an entire continent that one did not know was there.
Ed McCormack: Catching Up with László
Paizs, Hungary's Greatest Living Artist, in Soho.
GALLERY & STUDIO . The World of the Working Artist. Vol.
5 No. 4, March-April 2003
AGAIN AND AGAIN: PLEXI-WORKS
The works of László Paizs
Plexiglass is the material of 20th century art.
And now it is the material of 21st century art, too.
Its history in Hungarian art, by way of the evolution and consummation
of the life oeuvre of Paizs, follows a trajectory from 1969 until the
present day.
Self-appointed followers, travel companions and kindred souls stand
in the background.
Just as there were no cell phones in the Middle Ages, there were no
plexiglass sculptures either. Thus, we can say that the plexiglass
sculpture is modern and of the moment. At the same time, we also know
that things, in fact, do not really change at all, or just barely.
But then, the plexiglass works, driven by sedate geometry, the cold
constructivist spirit - which the Master presented in 1976, collected
together at the Csók István Gallery in Budapest. The compositions of
the chaotic maelstrom slowly conveyed their place - the drama of the
object interrupted in its fall, the lyric of frozen smoke - which,
30 years later, in 2005, are presented to the audience, likewise at
the Csók István Gallery in Budapest. (There are, then, still places,
locations encompassed in living legend.)
Let us not attach too much importance to the plexiglass material itself,
however; nothing ever became a work of art simply through its material,
not from its material alone - at most, perhaps more rare, more valuable
or more unusual.
As to the plexiglass sculpture - allow us to be sometimes boldly (slightly)
full of pathos - it, too, will become a work of art by way of the spirit,
thinking, recognition and unusual vision embodied within it.
In this case, the unusual dimension is inherent in the transparent
vision.
The transparency of the plexiglass sculpture, at the same time, does
not presume transparency of the spirit embodied within it.
Rather, this is only a case of non-transparency appearing within the
transparency. Beneath the transparent surface, this is the initial
so-called level of collision of the conflicts appearing within the
translucent mass.
The Paizs-plexi: the dramatic situation between the encased, stiffened,
inclusion-like (fossil) object and object collage.
The objects float and are easily removable. And then the objects imperceptibly
evolve into things that are difficult to recognise, and progressively
into mere concepts.
These concepts are complex, and they bear ambiguous, simultaneous meanings.
The Paizs-plexi: the floating symbol-object or symbol-organisation
taking clear form is transposed, an embodiment and presentation lifted
from its original self.
An inclusion (relic) rendered metaphor. A solid, hard, dense object
with spatial illusionism that autonomously dissolves and penetrates,
inhales and radiates.
According to the determination of the Master, this plexiglass work
is "conscious fossilisation".
Encased and exhibited inside is the deformed, mangled, shredded or
disintegrated, singed, charred requisite - going to ruin, like a residue,
relic-like, encumbered with weighty meanings, which suggest that we
are post- : participants after the fact, following the events.
In connection with his plexiglass works of 1971, his contemporary,
László Lakner, wrote: "The man pours into plexiglass what he is
afraid of. He makes his art from that which he fears."
Today, in 2006(07), after the fears we have grown tired of, the acts,
the phenomena; we find ourselves in the era of the dilapidated chicken-skeleton,
the destroyed clock, the pincers clinging to pincers, the revolutionary-newspaper-letterhead-fragment,
the block of remnants of ground-up paper currency.
Captivated by the sight and knowledge of the new absurdities and paradoxes.
The chance and the possibility for superiority lost, at least so long
as - caught up in the current of the good, old "New Economy mechanism" -
specimens of the HUF 6,80 shaving-mirror set, which cannot really be
deemed to have been designed, survive. (Maintaining a shaving mirror
for six forints and eighty fillers as something entirely natural.)
We might initiate ourselves as the actors of surreal dreams come to
life, as moved by the memories and prognosticated visions of the future
rushing down upon us from the plexiglass works; we scurry into the
privatised revolution like one-legged broiler-chickens, and meanwhile,
somehow, we are still enchanted by our own tragic beauty.
The new era drags along behind it its oppressive legacy of bygone decades
as a handicap.
But as a bit of refreshment, we might ponder that which is explicable
with difficulty: if facsimile is "cs", then why is plexi "x"?
Could it be that we are simply the irretrievable slaves of our traditions
and customs, of convention?
Tibor Wehner
The Stigmas of 1956
The sublimely tragic chapter of modern Hungarian history
was the 1956 revolution and war of independence: the dramatic unfolding
of events - of the unrestrainable explosion of the thirst for freedom,
the heroic undertaking of the battle and the crush of the struggle
- was synthesised into the symbol of irrepressible force, inherent
in the national consciousness, the national solidarity. Painter László
Paizs also lived through the Budapest events of the revolution, as
a second-year student of the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts. Just
like in so many of his contemporaries, the revolutionary exaltation
of the Budapest people took root in him for life, carrying him along
with its momentum, and the images of the occurrences became profoundly
etched in his visual memory: the radios placed in windows, the captions
painted onto display windows, the leaflets fluttering down, the burnt-out
tanks, the overturned trams, the buildings shot to devastation, the
rooms without walls, opening onto the street, the mutilated remains
of building ornaments. On the half-century anniversary of the revolution
and the war of independence, László Paizs evokes the visions of his
memory in his large-scale, expressive series, entitled Wounds 1956 .
It is not to a time-travel illustrated with a journalistic account
that he invites us, however, but with his unusually formed, painterly-sculpturally
compositions, he rather summarises in a sensory expression the beauty
of the revolution - as guided through his world of dreamlike reminiscences
and visions, the drastic nature of the crush and the pain of failure.
Between the surfaces and spaces of László Paizs, freely wandering in
the world of his compositions - roaming here in the sphere of his sculptural
object-creation, there in his painterly creation of the image, or there
in the borderland where the two merge - the motifs of destiny-changing
20th-century Hungarian history emerge over and over again: his 1970s
object, entitled The Murder of the Heirs to the Throne (news report,
28 June 1914), made of newspaper, insects and plexiglass, is
an emblematic chef-d'oeuvre of modern Hungarian art, but we can refer
to numerous other compositions from the 1980s and 1990s that reflect
upon the absurdity of the Communist regime, and are staggering. The
large-scale panels of the Wounds 1956 series, also unfurling
a sculptural universe of effects - in which "shots", strikes
and pierces open into wounds and craters, and in which the indissoluble
textural and factural material characteristics, forming reliefs, fuse
into a flawless unit with painterly-artificial traces of intervention
- are compositions of historical definition, but also of transposed,
metaphorical phrasing. The dominant motifs of these works are the aggressive
and brutal fractures of the panels, in which the characteristic shadow-like
figures, obscurely sketched, alluding to Budapest's eclectic building
sculptures and ornamentation, and their classical, mediaeval and ancient
archetypes, appear only in lieu of a secondary catchword: torsos and
pietas. Beyond all this, László Paizs elaborates a visual language
that ingeniously amalgamates a non-figurativeness and figurativeness,
at the same time fusing temporal planes, and with his shooting sequence,
and his traces of 1956 Central/Eastern European bullet-scars, the general
comprehension, mentality and heroic readiness to sacrifice raise the
lacerated-slashed compositions to the heights.
The devices of László Paizs, the alchemist painter - organically linked
to the earlier periods of his oeuvre - include polyester, earth, brick
powder, plywood, acrylic, from which and in which golden stigmas dawn
in his slashed visual terrains of restrained white and grey, and occasionally
black stains: we are confronted with captivating monumental, historical
frescoes, saturated with the authenticity of his personality and intimate
lyricism, i.e., with our past which opens onto mystical perspectives.s
Tibor Wehner
Paizs László retrospekt"iv"
"The work which the members of the Studio
of Young Artists have produced so far demonstrates their laudable endeavours
continually to perfect and refine their craft, their skill and their
philosophy in order to produce fine, Socialist-Realist type art. A
fair number of these young artists make the effort to imbue their talents
with a Marxist-Leninist awareness, and to ensure the durability of
the bonds wrought in their childhood and youth. (.) Within the particular
branches of their art they have boldly undertaken to make the depiction
of life and of our lives the focus of their work. Their art shows signs
of an increasingly encouraging internal ideological development which
may be categorised as artistic bias. In their work they strive to examine
and capture the processes of reality, which means that they have taken
a position on the most immediate question in art today: they seek to
reconcile the bias emerging in tendencies of objective reality with
their own subjective bias."
As this review of the 1961 exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists
indicates (it was written by Gyula Bence 20 and appeared in the
weekly periodical Élet és Irodalom), the position of reality and
art, and the relationship between them, was quite complex (or simple)
in Hungary at the end of the fifties, beginning of the sixties,
the time when László Paizs began his career as an artist. Official
watchdogs kept an ever-watchful eye on this admittedly intricate
relationship between reality and art, as is shown by the fact that
Bence is not content only to make approving noises in his review;
after congratulating the artists on their Socialist Realism, he
goes on to enumerate the problems. Quite a few of the artists,
including László Lakner, György Korga and Ferenc Kóka, as well
as László Paizs, are accused of having strayed into the "bog of
abstractionism", and "some of our young artists are strongly affected
by a petit-bourgeois pedantry and by codified pathological obsessions
coupled with a kind of punctiliousness."
Despite this, however, it is still clear that, in contrast to the complete
stagnation which afflicted Hungarian art in the fifties, the beginning
of the sixties was a time of rebirth and of loosening restrictions.
After the failed anti-Soviet uprising and the retributions which followed
it, the artists and the progressive members of the new, emergent generation,
despite being cut off from Europe both physically and intellectually,
nonetheless began their own war of artistic liberation. This is not
to say that the gates were opened wide; they opened by the merest crack;
producing modern works devoid of ideological manipulation and reflecting
the new spirit still led to the artist being intellectually ostracised,
persecuted, or forced to emigrate. The ruthless conservatism of the
regime's artistic policy was doggedly protected. It was under circumstances
such as this that Jenő Gadányi, Tihamér Gyarmathy and Tamás Lossonczy
slowly re-emerged, that Dezső Korniss was able to exhibit his latest
output, and Béla Kondor burst onto the contemporary art scene, establishing
a school of his own. Then the Iparterv (Industrial Plan) Generation
appeared, and once their works had penetrated the peripheries, a much
more sophisticated style of contemporary art was able to follow in
its wake. Turning against the official, realist trends, or simply working
in tandem with this favoured official line, art works appeared which
sought to confront Central European existence at the turn of the millennium
and to involve themselves in a polemic about the possibilities of artistic
creation - and increasingly these works of art demanded the freedom
to be publicly recognised.
This permanent state of insecurity, which fed on the ambivalent fluctuations
between permissive concessions and inhibitive restrictions, the
ebb and flow of a now-stricter-now-laxer policy of official support,
official suppression or officially turning a blind eye, forced
Hungarian art and its artists into alternately offensive and defensive
positions. An ironic and grotesque interpretation and idiom, an
attitude with clear leanings toward the absurd, was reflected in
this art, evoking an atmosphere that could readily be identified
with. Until the eighties, its purpose - whether conscious or unconscious
- was to relay the message that there was no way out of the cul
de sac that the communist experiment had become; that hope for
a radical, fundamental shift was more or less forlorn. Following
the unexpected collapse of communism, however, artistic liberty
suddenly arrived on a plate. But instead of flourishing, art found
itself almost imperceptibly pushed into the background, and marginalised
until it became almost redundant. In undertaking to trace the career
of László Paizs, therefore, with all its wealth of works and innovative
initiatives, one must be ever aware of the conditions that prevailed
during those four decades, conditions that were suboptimal, but
nevertheless made for an inspiring creative environment. There
is not the scope here for an in-depth and comprehensive analysis
of Paizs's career - an endeavour which would be extremely difficult
in any case, given that Paizs continues to produce major works
which add new depth and dimension to his oeuvre.
Paizs graduated from the Hungarian College of Applied Art in 1959.
His subsequent career has so far spanned over four decades, but
like that of many of his contemporaries, it cannot be divided into
neat sequential stages and pigeon-holed units. It is much more
akin to an intricate Baroque arch, made up of seemingly unconnected
strands. The composition dates of the pieces are of little relevance.
The whole oeuvre gushes forth like a waterfall, reaching back and
ahead in seemingly incoherent flights of fancy. Different branches
of art, different genres, categories, techniques, materials, creative
approaches and trends are interchanged in his work with easy elegance
and supreme confidence, allied to a passion for experimentation.
The almost completely autonomous sets of works are, nevertheless,
distinctly connected by a handful of fundamental components. Examples
of these are Paizs's keenness to explore new forms of expression,
his appetite for experimentation and for developing suggestive
artistic effects, his penchant for the monumental, and his lightly
provocative, rather than meditative, attitude. His sets of works
are reflections of both Realism and Abstraction, Figurative and
Non-Figurative depiction, geometry and Minimalism, Pop-Art objectivity
and expressivity, quotation-rich Post-Modern directions and styles.
Making use of the visual idiom and the effects of these trends,
now with an ebullient delight in story-telling, now in terse phrasing,
his pieces become sensitive diagnoses of a period full strange
absurdities, a comprehensive creative portrait of the period's
restive artist, one who unconditionally took on intellectual confrontations
and the resulting narrow-minded existential retributions.
Painting, drawing, sculpture - if these classical terms are still applicable
to twentieth-century art - are the labels to use in analysing the work
of László Paizs. In his output one finds programmatic, two-dimensional
mural works attached to buildings; abstract sculptures assimilated
to the surrounding architecture and standing in city squares; indoor
sculptures and reliefs; large panel paintings; traditional paintings
and drawings to be hung on the wall; small sculptures; autonomous and
applied, sovereign and functional pieces; spatial sculptures forming
integral parts of interior architecture; and decorative objects standing
out like sculptures from their environment - along with transitions
and fusions and dissolutions between artistic genres, positions and
stances. Paizs is one of the few contemporary Hungarian artists who
are just as much at home in two dimensions as in outdoor and indoor
spaces, in scales from small to monumental, and who is inspired rather
than paralysed by apparently inflexible circumstances and preconditions
and by the demands of his patrons. Breaking limitations and conventions
is Paizs's natural element; using the material and technical innovation
are merely starting points, tools of expression, novelties taking shape
in the expressive milieu, to explore the unknown and to create works
with a new essence. Independent of familiar types and templates, the
forms of the composition are imbued with vivid ideas and a passionate
emotional content, turning them into material or object that seems
stretched to bursting point.
In his 1979 monograph on Paizs's early period, the art historian János
Frank 21 summarised Paizs's work thus: "László Paizs studied painting
at the Academy, and for five years he painted what the state art
world demanded: Post-Impressionist pictures with a bit of tired
old Constructivist framework. He wearied of it, and in 1967 he
began to experiment with new techniques - smoked leather pictures
- and since 1969 he has been interested in plastics". The study,
which deals with Paizs's plexiglass and polyester works, as well
as his metal sculptures, does not discuss the traditional works
which Paizs produced for state commissions. These were a something
akin to preliminary studies for his later monumental pieces, and
are at once documents of the period's official perspective and
mood, and the artist's insatiable desire to experiment. Most notable
among the works that stand in public buildings in Budapest, Pécs,
Szeged, Székesfehérvár, and Gödöllő, or among the murals executed
with the surrounding architecture in mind, and which transmuted
genre scenes into symbolic expressions, are the mosaics which made
use of new materials (acrylic resin and glass), and new wall paintings
painted with walkyd. Of course, like the Post-Impressionist compositions,
these projects, which Paizs took on primarily from the need to
earn a living, did not satisfy even the most elementary ambitions
of the young artist. After the "experience" of his visit to the
Venice Biennale in 1964, Paizs turned toward new modes of expression,
new materials and new techniques, or rather, toward new creative
methodologies. In 1967, however, his clothing, textile and leather
work, which synthesised realistic texture into real, or rather
into realistically artistic texture, and which made use of the
way both Dadaism and Pop Art utilised objects, was not greeted
with great enthusiasm. The jury ordered the pieces to be removed
from the exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists.
The result of this crude rebuke was to mature in Paizs the first unique
set of compositions which rejected all the traditional rules of
sculpture. The desire to stick with the sensitive "clothes pictures"
and "textile compositions", and the object collages in boxes with
glass lids containing orthodontic braces, horse brushes, etc, inspired
the artist to compose (art)objects embedded in plexiglass. Long
years of technical experimentation produced several works and sets
of works which to this day have no match in Hungarian art. The
compositions of objects and sets of objects encased in colourless,
transparent plexiglass blocks - the first being Embroidered Hip
Pocket, succeeded by Red Block and Green Block (Part of a Woman's
Suit), enclosing a suit jacket and costume - were, in the final
years of the sixties, strikingly expressive sculptures, peculiar
and strange in their artificial closed-in worlds. The plexiglass
slabs produced an optical effect different from the technique used
in glass art, but which provided a balance between reality and
illusion, surrounding themselves with a mysterious aura. In a retrospective
study on Paizs's art, Emese Révész22 has written the following:
"The aesthetic attributes of plexiglass, its glasslike, transparent
purity, create an autonomous space for the objects encased inside
it, sealing them off while at the same time focusing attention
on them, creating a situation whereby the things wrested from space
and time appear as selected values. It lends the same special attention
and transcendent airiness to the sensitive, scarred pictures of
ephemeral material, which he was deprived of two years ago. After
encasing earlier works, Paizs placed everyday appliances and subsequently
symbolic sets of objects into the plastic blocks. Integrating the
mundane objective environment into the art work, with the resulting
social criticism that this implies - sometimes ironic, sometimes
dramatic, but always relying on popular symbols - is a standard
characteristic of Pop Art. Encased objects and the feeling towards
life thus captured are, on the other hand, typically Central European".
In the catalogue of the 1971 exhibition in the Adolf Fényes Gallery
(a show that "paid its own way", meaning that it did not receive
state support but was merely tolerated), the contemporary artist
László Lakner23 wrote the following about these symbolic objects,
which receive emphasis by virtue of their position and which are
enclosed in a medium which physically hides their dimensions: "Man
casts the things he fears in plexiglass, he turns the things he
fears into art". Works like The Crown Prince and Princess Have
Been Murdered, or Truman and Attlee Have Announced the Completion
of the Atom Bomb, plexiglass variations of an atomic cloud made
out of gauze, a broken television screen, a shaving mirror bought
for Ft. 6.80 (a roundabout allusion to the terrible events that
took place in Central Europe in 1968) completely bewildered M.
S.24, a critic on the newspaper Magyar Nemzet, who claimed that
"these compositions cannot be called art". Since then The Crown
Prince and Princess Have Been Murdered has become one of the major
art works of the period, invested with emblematic significance.
Belonging now to the Hungarian National Gallery, it consists of
menacing stag beetles crawling out of a crumpled Pesti Hírlap newspaper
dated June 28, 1914, encased in a slab of plexiglass. Numerous
other pieces from the 1971 exhibition have made their way into
recognised public and private collections. Paizs's The Postimpressionist
Painter's Nylon Shirt, also from 1969, similarly condenses the
atmosphere, character and spirit of that period into a symbolic
art work. The plexiglass block, exhibited at one of the last exhibitions
in the Chapel in Balatonboglár, before these shows were finally
stopped, contains a snow-white nylon shirt in a canvas stretcher
with a palm-sized hole where the heart would be. Above the hole
the artist has carved into the fibreglass a concise statement of
his attitude to life: "László Paizs, born December 26, 1935, still
living on July 14, 1971".
Paizs's objects-in-plexiglass period did not last long; in 1976 he
came out with a new collection of art works at a show in the István
Csók Gallery in Budapest. These colourless, transparent plexiglass
and the coloured, usually red and black, non-transparent polyester
compositions did not contain any objects. The internal mass or
surfaces consisted of basically geometric shapes, a regular order
of negative or positive forms and spaces, shown reflected in mirrors
or blending into each other, suggestively running together, or
else closed over and covered by painted surfaces. These sculptures
are cloaked in a frigidity and stiff composure. Tibor Csiky's Constructivist-Geometric,
Minimalist experiments were gaining followers in Hungarian sculpture
at this time. In Paizs's works, too, discipline and severity sparred
with decorative playfulness. As János Frank's put it, the artist
was "carving nothing" when he produced his plexiglass works. In
working nothing into something, Paizs was actually employing classical
sculpture techniques. He poured the liquid plexiglass components
into a mould, and to the resulting block - a cube, slab, sphere
or tall cylinder - he added motifs by various different techniques,
then carved them, and in the final phase he polished the surface.
Paizs describes the process as follows: "At first I only wanted
the plexiglass to be transparent so that the object I encased in
it would be visible. Later I realised that the plexiglass was beautiful
in its own right, I recognised the BEAUTY in it, in capital letters,
and so I began to feel that this material itself should play a
larger part. Everything that was accidental and not final must
be eliminated. When I poured objects into the plexiglass, chance
played a large part in the whole process, the object could shift
during the pouring, the composition could change, etc. I felt that
what came after this could only be strict order, only the essence
and only what follows from the laws of the material. In addition
to the plexiglass I chose another material, polyester. I wanted
to prove that plastic is just as suitable for a work of art as
any other material. For this reason I first wanted to make the
basic shapes, which I could pursue later". These works of his,
composed according to such Minimalist, Puritan, geometric tenets,
were subsequently reworked in a more classical style, in metal.
The sculpture which greets visitors to the town of Zalaegerszeg
acts as a monumental culmination to this set of works: a seven
and a half meter-high double chrome pillar composition. Paving
the way for this piece were some small sculptures forged from five
and three elements, with small notches on the surface of the top
section, the convex shapes turned inside out into concave cylinders
of acrylic and bronze. The Zalaegerszeg work stands in front of
a prefabricated highrise block at the intersection of three roads,
a symbolic, decorative monument suffused with dignity. This chrome
composition, too, is technically more than merely a sculpture;
its characteristic and important elements of expression are the
optical effects produced by the changing light and the reflections
of the surrounding environment.
Paizs took advantage of the possibilities offered by polyester to create
some large-scale outdoor and indoor works. We are into the early
eighties by now, into a period when attitudes were becoming more
relaxed. Government ideology was no longer such a rigid driving
force behind commissions for public places, both in Budapest and
other cities around the country. In these pieces the harmony between
colour and form, the rhythm of positive and negative surfaces,
the idea that the inside of a space carved into the hollow cavity
of the polyester mass should be laid open and be presented, were
important elements. Two basic geometric shapes, the sphere and
the triangle, determine the aspect of these works. A composition
of two spheres placed on the floor stand in the reception area
of Hotel Irottkő in Kőszeg (1979) and in front of the Budapest
Convention Centre (1980), while in Szeged (1979) and Szentendre
(1983) there are beam compositions whose outlines form the shape
of a triangle with rounded corners. The spheres are constructed
as a double, upright arrangement; the triangle lays down wedge
shapes on top of a slanted marble sheet. With their decorative
purpose, their pure forms and materials and their technical execution,
these works stood completely apart from the public objects that
were inspired by the politics of the time and thus ideologically
slanted. In the eighties and nineties Paizs also produced numerous
sculptures which had an applied function. One could describe the
one in Kecskemét as a building decoration, a relief perhaps, while
the ones in Hódmezővásárhely and Miskolc could be regarded as sculptures,
or rather suspended sculptures, while a great number of reliefs,
sculptural wall partitions and suspended ceilings can be seen in
cities both inside and outside Hungary, in Budapest, Győr, Bonn,
and Canberra.
In the mid eighties Paizs left small sculptures behind him and, while
continuing to work on monumental, autonomous and applied compositions
as well as polyesters and bronzes - which hover on the borderline
between autonomy and functionality - he seems to have returned
to painting. (The last concrete panel paintings in Paizs's oeuvre
were seen at the Studio exhibition in 1966 when the artist, surprising
and affronting the profession, exhibited three non-figurative pieces.)
His return to painting in the eighties was only an apparent return,
because Paizs did not, of course, produce regular panel paintings
as such, but "fossils", two-dimensional works of a kind of plastic
which he had developed. In these works, exhibited at a show entitled
European Fossil Variations in the Budapest Műcsarnok (Palace of
Art) in 1987, relief-like formations break up the level surface.
Most are made of coloured polyester or coloured plexiglass-polyester,
fixed to pressed boards in awesome, two-and-a-half by three-and-half-metre
dimensions. The relief-picture series employs dramatic tones and
tragic voices that were thus far unknown in Paizs's oeuvre; it
was far removed from the familiar objectivity, geometry and Minimalism,
entering instead on a world without definable shape and in eruptive
disarray, in such a way that figural motifs also appeared in the
space behind the works. Art historian Lóránd Hegyi25 writes about
this radical shift in a piece comparing Paizs's old and new works,
for the introduction to the catalogue of the Műcsarnok exhibition:
"Complexity does not become crystallised into a single, closed,
logically constructed form; rather it opens out before the viewer
the broad territories of subjective experience. At the same time
subjective interpretation does not run unchecked; the work is full
of references to cultural history and to faintly emerging art historical
motives, and these determine the way it is interpreted. The inexhaustible
richness of the brushwork is not merely the counterpoint to the
"old" Paizs works, whose approach to form was impersonal and showed
no trace of the human hand or manual intervention, and which asserted
the form principle by reducing it to its abstract purity, but is
the visual-sculptural medium for a poetic interpretation of history.
Because the brushwork - at fist glance merely presenting its own
material and sensual richness, incredibly differentiated, reminiscent
of smouldering ruins and molten metal surfaces, or dilapidated,
crumbling objects covered with filthy, festering industrial detritus
- does not merely present itself; instead, through the visions
of decay and destruction, it evokes this or the other moment of
cultural history, motifs which have become a topos, this or the
other masterpiece". Related to these huge, European fossil-relief
panels are those panels or reliefs from the early nineties which
Paizs made for Hungarian foreign missions, such as in Munich (1990)
and New York (1991).
If in the eighties, Paizs's art culminated in painted polyester panels
and reliefs, his most important experiment in the nineties was
his coupling of drawing and painting, an endeavour that is prominent
in the works exhibited in the decade's two exhibitions, in the
Budapest Gallery in 1997 and the Pest Centre Gallery in 1999. Again,
he by no means pursued a purely graphic or purely painterly technique
and approach; these works, which make use of the tools of both
drawing and painting, actually involve a number of different techniques.
The line, or the graphic process of printing, plays a special role,
as does the gesture-like use of colour. The effect of the compositions
of liquid polyester "smeared" onto huge paper sheets - pressed
on using a jeep - is thus a set of complex expressions achieved
through the blending of material and technique. Moreover, Paizs's
work from the nineties retains, or reinforces, the role, presence
and significance of the figure. The central motif is the standing
or softly reclining figure, usually male. If the figure is standing,
a stepping motion serves to jar the body somewhat: perhaps a spear-bearer
by Polyclitus appears, or a youth by Praxiteles, or else two figures
from a Greek sculpture group, obscure and fractured and iconographic.
Otherwise the figures might be overtly Christian: mediaeval models
of John the Baptist or Saint Sebastian. These pieces are in keeping
with Paizs's large-scale works in that they fuse a number of approaches,
a tendency that marks much of his oeuvre. The traditional techniques
of painting and drawing combine, just as the metal-coloured polyester
blends gold and sliver powder. The tone, however, is something
new. While in the eighties there was a sense of drama and foreboding,
in the second half of the nineties the work is more tempered and
looks back to the past. The metallic glimmer of the polyester with
its blend of gold and silver powder exhibits a decadent profundity,
and the peculiar glow and intense lustre of these monumental pieces
reinforces the conviction that we are face to face with the heroes
of a long-gone, forgotten golden age, an age that has sunk into
the sea. The simultaneous presence of a technique that is both
archaising and ground-breaking creates a tight sense of unity.
A recent review of the history of twentieth-century Hungarian art by
Gábor Andrási, Gábor Pataki, György Szűcs and András Zwickl26,
entitled Magyar képzőművészet a 20. században (Hungarian Fine Art
in the 20th Century, Corvina, Budapest, 1999), contains three references
to Paizs's work. On page 178 the authors, in their analysis of
how the avant-garde gained ground in the seventies, note that:
"The expansion continued abroad: Attila Csáji organised a grand
touring exhibition in Poland for the summer, where the young participants
with a similar outlook and style from Szürenon and Iparterv (János
Fajó, László Paizs), and the major figures of the elder generation
(Endre Bálint, Tihamér Gyarmathy), presented their work in three
cities (Poznan, Lodz, Szczecin)". In discussing the art that was
produced using the formal structures of the new geometry the authors
observe, on page 195: "That is how, in the seventies, works like
this were able to be produced. Examples are, among others, Ilona
Keserü's polyester wall in Szolnok and her panel in Dunaújváros,
János Fajó's two murals in Budapest and his mosaic in Gödöllő,
Tibor Csiky and Zoltán Bohus's relief on the Martinelli Square
façade of the Post Office building, and László Paizs's large chrome
sculpture". Finally, on page 198, they write the following: "In
the course of the decade, the geometric-reductive approach to form
gave rise to such oeuvres as that of László Paizs, who constructs
large plastic sculptures that make use of the contrast between
elementary bodies (the sphere, block, cylinder) and the negative
forms carved from them.". What follows from all this is that the
key elements of the oeuvre do not and cannot emerge when embedded
in a global context; the relationships are lost, the accents are
altered and fail to come to the fore, key works are not pointed
out. The story of László Paizs's career as a painter, sculptor,
graphist and applied artist (whose conviction, manifested in his
art, is that fine and applied arts are not different art forms),
and the development and nature of his works, are extremely complex,
a fact which this analysis has perhaps been able to demonstrate
in more detail. It is a topic which warrants further research,
a reconstruction and documentation that promises to stimulate new
interpretations, give rise to new implications and a different
fundamental understanding of the period. In all its intricacy and
complexity, the art and world of László Paizs comes forward as
a coalescent whole which spanned the entire period in twentieth-century
Hungarian art from the late fifties until the present day, incorporating
progressive endeavours while remaining essentially unique. Notwithstanding
the changes it underwent, it always remained a single entity, following
an unbroken course.
Tibor Wehner
