.	Rotated Pictures About Endre Koronczi's latest works	.
		.	Ernõ Tolvaly

In his opening speech entitled Self-Painting Pictures, Balázs Fa describes the method by which Endre Koronczi created his latest pictures.

Endre Koronczi´s latest paintings are serial pictures. While keeping certain attributes of series, they also contradict others. Series are essentially to be looked at and valid as a whole. One by one the parts lose their significance, the message gets lost or changed, becomes independent, departs from the original. The parts do not represent any aesthetic values by themselves, either visually, or conceptually. If they do, it is something unlike the original idea, it is different and accidental. Should we pick out one piece from Endre Koronczi´s series of pictures, the very conception would be snuffed out. Visual aesthetic quality was not planned on; nice or poor appearance, the excitement or beauty of form was not considered.

Koronczi´s work has one theme. Seemingly, the picture itself is the theme, and its instrument and self-self-realizer as well at the same time. Theme, painting instrument, painter; all in one. The themes of the subsequent pictures - and the theme is always the same - do not complete each other, do not explain each other. Paradoxically, these pictures are comprehensible only when seen side by side. It is a method much proven, long since employed by the fine arts. The examples are plentiful. Our experience is the same in the case of András Lengyel´s sky-montages. It´s pointless to look at each blue rectangle separately, just as it´s pointless to select and evaluate one of Zsigmond Károlyi´s vertically striped pictures hung lopsidedly on the wall; or to frame one of Attila Menesi´s sheets with its pattern of wall smudges and cracks, put it on the wall and look at it. Karl Andre´s works make up a system, if observed successively, just like the "Kopf" series of Ákos Birkás, but they are valid separately, too. In the case of the artists mentioned above, the single pieces are derived from the system; still, they are not valid separately. There is another difference, but it gets overlooked in the exhibition hall. This is the rite of painting. Here, it is separated from the act of painting, the rite belongs to the idea; it is the rite of conception, conceiving is the act of creation itself. After that, it only has to be realized; the product has to be "manufactured". The artist stays clear of the process of realization, he is distant, reserved, a part of the machine - charged and animated by his conception. He takes part in the manufacturing - but he could entrust it to anybody. The rite is the rite of conception and discovery, and not of realization. However, it never happens so purely. The emotional charge of the moment of selection, the choice of colors, the motions of painting, the profundity of contemplation and meditation; the multiplicity of all the things experienced and endured while the work was done result in the subjectiveness, recognizability, uniqueness of the product.

Endre Koronczi rotates one canvas against another, moving and spreading the paint in between. It is a machine, just like the camera in Lengyel´s hand. This is the machine that, activated by the artist, manufactures all the possible variations of the pre-conceived system. Although, from an aesthetic aspect, it is indifferent for András Lengyel, what kind of blue is captured by his camera, he can see what the product will be. Károlyi designs his products, but he holds an emotional and sensual dialogue with his picture while he paints, and allows for certain changes within the plan. Ákos Birkás doesn’t have questions and answers - he exists together with the picture, continuously, perfectly; emotions and mechanism circling as one. One generating coldness, the other is generating heat; in this equilibrium of body warmth gyrate artist and his piece of art, whirling together, round and round, up and down, as if both of them wanted to be twisted out of this concrete, square world, to be sucked into the centre in a slow melancholic madness.

Endre Koronczi´s activity - his WORK - is an emotionless mechanism. He is not attached to the fruits of his work, he won’t look, he can’t see it. Measurements, colors, quantities of paint are chosen at random; movements are precisely determined . The pictures paint themselves and each other; stuck together, they rub with a mechanical eroticism. The act finished, the artist separates the participants: the printer and the printed, turns them over like the pages of a book, opens the book. Form and print are now side by side; the empty space in front of them is the space that has been between them; their sight, dependent on each other as they stared at each other pressed together, is like Ben Vautier´s mirrors locked face to face in a black box.

The artist stays clear, he’s distant and reserved. Those who choose this method are not of a more prosaic talent than others. I don’t suppose they just give a push to the praying wheel so they don’t have to bother anymore. The method can be regarded as modest or provocative (Balázs Fa), the product can be nice, exciting, or even boring. This is what’s the most remarkable about these pictures. Amidst all the aesthetical and time-spirited niceties, the fashion trends, the epidemic of caricature painting, somebody works in a way that can result in two-thirds of his series being bad, useless or ugly. His method is honest and risky, ironic and self-ironic at the same time: the painter has his picture painted, the painter does not see his picture. There’s no provocation against art in this, nor the old-fashioned gesture of hostility to art; it is not irritated by a compulsion to reform. Endre Koronczi is on the side of change, but not with a practical foresight: he takes risks, he might fail, but it does not affect his work. The famous Wittgensteinian sentence, deteriorated by overuse to a commonplace, ´What cannot be spoken about must be kept silent about´ has been paraphrased by Miklós Erdélyi into ´What cannot be spoken about must be spoken about.´ However, art is communicating again about topics everybody already knows, everybody has already understood, and nobody will have any trouble recognizing. WE HAVE TO SPEAK ABOUT WHAT WE DON’T KNOW!

Endre Koronczi´s themes are the image, the painter, the act of painting, and those powers and distances that cannot be seen, only felt, when the stuck-together pictures are opened, the perceptible but unknowable happening. His pictures show both the regularities of the irregular natural world, and the obscurity of geometry - in one well-known, condensed sign. The circles that materialize from the rotating movement bring to mind the regular semicircles scratched on partition-walls by the wind-blown boughs of city shrubs, the corrosion caused in rotating steel parts as likely, as purely geometric forms painted after some design that, at some point, has suddenly been altered. What he paints are not sectors or rectangles, but the unknown and unpredictable field of force that lies between the dull principles of his machine and its products, that somehow evade these principles. HE DOES NOT KNOW BEFOREHAND WHAT HE WILL SAY!

Cézanne, in his old days, once during a conversation pointed to the sky with his finger, saying ´This is the only thing that counts!´ At the end of his life, blue was the colour that entwined the visible parts of the world. He wasn’t painting apples, mountains, foliage, or rocks, he painted the colour blue around familiar objects, as these slowly dissolved in the blue eternity that revealed nothing.

´On the border of indifference, one has to describe the watermark of the void gaping at the edge of nothingness, one should question the mysterious laws of indifference.´ (János Sebôk)

Miklós Szentkuthy wrote in his essay ´Shakespeare´s Sonnets´ about the 16th Sonnet: ´Shakespeare knows only too well that there’s no form of art whatsoever in this world comparable to the worth of real life.´ And ´We can lay it down with absolute, even dogmatic, certainty, that the greatest artists distinguish themselves by paying a thousand times more attention to the horribly ´imposing´ reality of real life than to anybody´s, including his own, noble secretions.´

´All art is thou´ wrote Shakespeare to his beloved, to a real person - to reality - for no work of art, no imitation of reality, no damnation of reality can be so profound, rich, and varied as reality, the model itself. There’s no work of art with such a dizzying mystery, with such a conventional, experimental, emotional, and sensual profundity, with such an irresistible attraction that even the simplest, most unobtrusive object, even the commonest of incidences offer. What Endre Koronczi does is work; mechanical and sensual, just like any other kind of work. Paint, set, rotate, open, put beside each other. Start again. Meditation coincides with work. The artist stays clear, he’s distant and reserved, but he is a participant as well, he is divided into two, the conceiver of the conception and worker realizing it. While he lifts in (and not imitates) reality, he experiences a personal relationship with the substance. This is what fuels all of his conceptions, and all of his conceptions are realized outside, in the real environment. He does not merely model reality, but puts it beside his copy, repeats and reworks it, enriching all, multiplying the multitude of things, in an agony from the fluctuation of temperature between nothingness and bewilderment, in the embarrassed geometry of human principles. This experimenting of reality, this new naturalism of life seems a cultural shock, although art is long familiar with it.

Van Gogh´s paintings, by the end of his life, show a shifting of emphasis - they’re more gestures than paintings. On his self-portraits we see not the brush strokes but the great, both crazy and sad, euphoria of his will to be happy scratching bloody lines on his face. And we know how Rouault defiles his female figures by smudges and spatterings of paint, how Soutine moulds and works the faces of his deranged crazy women with his fingers, as it were, how Mednyánszky tortures and muddies his tramps. The artist not only models reality, but places it beside its copy. In this case, this reality is not so much a material, concrete, and visible thing, as the reality of events, nearly impressionless, having only some aura, a strong radiation that fills the pieces of art with a perceptible and mystic energy. This happens in the case of Schiele and Rainer, the Wiener school in general, Mühl and Nitsch, and not only in the case of Expressionists, but others as well, like Vautier, Arman, Klein, Spoeri, Chamberlain, the popart artist, and most representatives of Conceptualism.

These energies and radiations elevate Endre Koronczi´s pictures into the realm of unchangeable certainties that do not need verification, being, in themselves, immovable evidences. These transcend the existential dictates of styles and the spirit of time, and condense the fleeting impressions of change into symbols, transubstantiating the ephemeral character of aesthetic untrustworthiness.

Painting made its most important statements about the individual, about the way that is characteristic only of himself and his work. This one, individual, way evolves from the increasing social isolation of the individual, and it is supported by its own history and the already existing solutions offered by the history of art. The one remaining field open to the survey and outlining of the individual’s possibilities as a kind of solution is the examination of the social picture of environment and history, the multitude of impressions flowing in an even current, and the privacy of the elaboration as opposed to far-fetched world-redeeming purposes. The artist faces his canvas within ever tightening margins, and paints his own maps of the world as he, and nobody but him, sees it. In the late 80´s, early 90’s uncertainty was starting to take over every sphere of life. The increasing confusion in politics, in the economy, in social and cultural areas, presents a situation that does not inspire the artist, but saturates everything with a general feeling of depression and gloom. At the same time, there seems to be no need for art, except as a some light entertainment to keep up the illusion of the world’s complexity. The wheels run asynchronously. Art merely endures the world but does not affect it anymore. The artist’s work is free and impersonal.

´There´s no way out for me, but to stay at home to scrape the soil turning round and round myself, and to look at cherished pictures,´ wrote Christian Boltanski.

Boltanski´s observation is concerned with the world he is familiar with, with the world he considers important. More and more frequently, today´s artist - though his position has not changed much - makes use of his experiences, but does not limit himself to his own territory, he does not look only at the cherished pictures of his private world; he steps back and puts the emphasis on something that cannot yet be defined.

---