48 Tachisme, Gestural Abstraction, Action Painting – at first glance, these are the terms that come to mind when I think of Gábor Városi’s early works, painted in the second half of the 1980s. Turning away from the obligatory academic training (partly under the influence of his excellent master Zoltán Tölg-Molnár), the artist clearly chose the path of abstraction, although looking at the subsequent stages of his oeuvre it becomes clear that Városi was equally committed to representational / figurative depiction. Except that the special feature of his portrait-format, mixed-media paintings is that the young artist composed the lyrical elements by juxtaposing poles leaning into geometric abstraction. This duality is the source of the tension in his paintings, as the approaches used create the counterpoint of the compositions. Városi richly and lavishly covers the entire surface of the painting with amorphous fragments, which he counterpoints with geometric elements. In the pictorial space, formless fields of colour, patches, blobs, flowing streams of paint, winding grooves and surfaces in a variety of colours collide with geometric elements; straight lines, lines breaking at right angles, rectangles, squares, cross-formations, triangles and polygonal constructions. In counterpointing, the artist never positions the geometric details horizontally or vertically - not even enclosed in the central core – but in each case deflects and unhinges the geometrising fragment. The trouvaille occurs when, in spite of all of the above, the artworks always remain in balance. Amorphous and linear constructs occupy the entire image space. This is achieved in such a way that the surface is lightened in places and darkened in others. Csaba Kozák Art Historian Early Works 1987 Gábor Városi’s exhibition in Paris in 1987 was opened by Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), the world-famous, Hungarian-born artist, a legend, the “grandfather of Op-Art”.
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