302 There was a time when painters were unable to “venture into the oil business” as in the Middle Ages artists still used tempera to produce icons and panel paintings. It was only in the Renaissance that the revolutionary method of oil painting was invented. At first, the names of Giotto and Jan van Eyck may spring to mind, but from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, there was no stopping the progress of oil painting, which spread like wildfire around the world. This method is still the most widespread technique today, both in terms of representational / figurative and abstract painting, although there was one historic moment in the mid-twentieth century, when painters noticed the dots and amorphous patches of oil that had previously been dropped needlessly on the stone / floor / canvas as waste. It so happened that after the Second World War, a young man named Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) saw the potential of creating art by deliberately dripping, pouring and trickling oil paint on his canvases laid on the floor (Action Painting / Drip Painting). Of course – similarly to how one ball is needed to be set in motion in order for other balls to start moving in a game of pool – this required critics who gave the new movement its name and spread the word so that Europe would also yield to the American innovation and invasion. Robert Coates, the critic of The New Yorker, first coined the term Abstract Expressionism to describe the art of Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hoffman and Willem de Kooning, while Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, in a completely new approach, praised not the spectacle, the “end product”, but the primacy of the process of the painting and the backstory of the work, riddled with struggle. Abstract Expressionist painters fall into the category of either Gestural painting or Color Field painting. The most prominent of the latter were Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland. In Europe, the above phenomenon manifested itself under the labels of Art Informel (the notion of the formless) and Tachisme (stain painting). In Hungary (after a delay of little more than a decade), the formal features that show a definitive affinity with their American and Western European predecessors appeared in the works of Ignác Kokas, István Nádler, Tamás Hencze and Attila Balla. Indeed, the subject of this short writing is the Gestural painting of artist Gábor Városi, which would be unimaginable without the above-mentioned roots. Except that Városi is far from being a traditionalist. He knows, but consistently breaks the unspoken rules of gesture painting, along with its international and domestic traditions. He does this not out of defiance, but quite simply; he thinks and paints differently. With him, things (the process of painting) do not unfold in the way that is “official”. The essence of the gesture is that the artist’s psyche, freed from spiritual / mental judgement, applies the paint to the canvas automatically, instinctively, without internal control; his body, back, shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, drip / swing / swish / tap with continuous dynamic movement. This can be done with a brush, a cloth, from a box/tube or even with bare hands. The Reimagined Gesture by Csaba Kozák, art historian
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