305 The Reimagined Gesture This renders the painting unpredictable, revealing more about the creative psyche than a pre-planned, consciously orchestrated painterly execution. The artist’s innovative intentions, as is evident from this volume, can be observed in the diverse fields of fine art, photography and architecture, but his most spectacular innovations appear in his gestural paintings of the last few years. Looking at Gábor Városi’s large format, 150 × 120 and 150 × 240 cm paintings, one would, one would never guess that genesis actually begins on a piece of A4 paper. Which means that the process of creation is much more controlled and concentrated, since it is primarily performed by moving the wrist. The trick is that the larger scale is achieved through secret / concealed photographic manipulation, since only the final phase is visible to the viewer. Apart from oil painting, he works with mixed techniques and then places the larger paintings under plexiglass, making them transparent and exhibitable. But he does not stop here with this installation: he also lights his works from behind. The morphology of his gestures is familiar: wide, powerful splashes of paint, islands of amorphous patches, stormy motifs that enclose the centre of the picture or gestures that cover the entire space, dividing and fragmenting it. The space rotates in a spiral, with the gestures recording garlands, curves, waves and pendulum movements. White islands of erasures and scraped back segments often appear. His morphology evokes a chaotic, exploding, disintegrating, collapsing world order. In several of his paintings, the eliminating / shading and sacred symbol of the cross appears. His use of colours is fiery hot, sensually pulsating, thunderous. His colouring incorporates the liquid red of the furnaces, the glowing red of the sun, the colour of ripe oranges and the yellow of lemons. All counterpointed by fragments of white and black, both in the background, the foundation and the inner ranges of the colour fields. His titles are apt and succinctly descriptive: Burn-Out; Everything Burns Eventually; Expressive Still-life; Baroque Levitation; Fallen Angel; Horizontal Meets Vertical; Written in Flames; Memory of a Healed Wound; Life Imprint; Horizontal Dynamics; Suprematist Tale; The Forever and the Moment, etc. (The latter painting is jointly registered with painter and gallerist László Erdész.) Some of his works draw from the toolbox of geometric abstraction, as he breaks the details of the human face / eye at right angles, bordered by straight lines, so that the “subject” of the painting appears to peek out of the painting. Városi’s reimagined gestures, transcriptions and paraphrases thus go so far as to make the human being itself appear in the picture field, either visible or hidden to the naked eye. His daughters and family appear in several of his paintings. In Városi’s works, there is both a desire for selfrevelation and the duality / counterpoint of seclusion. This sincerity is (also) what adds tension to the artist’s works. Nevertheless, we should not forget the small, somewhat playful motifs, which sometimes include outlined, scratched, elongated animal figures drawn in a single line. It is as if he were referring to the cave paintings of the Stone Age. This is another kind of “gesture” made by the artist. Lastly, in several paintings, the artist himself appears in a small, subdued way, almost incidentally. In his black sunglasses, he says vitally and confidently: this is it; this is where I am now. I paint, therefore I am.
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