Heritesz Gábor kiállítása (Dorottya utcai kiállítóterem, Budapest, 1991)

There is an atelier under the City where you can hear nothing even by the time of the greatest daily traffic. Don't look for a window if you go astray down by any chance. Silen­ce is so endless, monotony of the artificial lights is so timeless so that it is worth only wor­king in the atelier of Gábor Heritesz. Creating space from nothing, dimensions from the im­mense, rhythm from monotony and light from darkness. The constructivist constructs. That is his work. It's very simple to say this. But he did it. He had decided to be a sculptor throwing up printworking more than a quarter of a century ago. The autodidact sculptor could have not less than help and friendship of Fe­renc Laborcz and later of Tibor Csiky. His way leaded him through copying and developing natural and organic forms towards new­­constructivism. He began with bases. He straightened the curved. He called the line vertical-horizontal-diagonal and turned the flat into a space. He had found the cube, the tube and the prism and he imagined these of paper, wood, metal. He realized the same thing of different materials and orde­red them into series. This is well-known by recent essays. I would like to mention only the works of the actual exhibition. There is something common in them. All of them are a sort of series or more variations of a certain thought, a thing found or manifes­tation of a thing found. In spite of their title the “Prejudice", the “Graffity" and the "Zagorsk" are polished, re-explained abstractions of the most trivial doors-gates /of loft, shit-house, hedges, other “openingcloser"/, reincarnations of a daily thing. The "Details" can be put here also, be­cause these snow,- or wind-shields talk about the ever-closed doors erected against winds. We can say about all of the works in the ex­hibition that the different objects-reliefs imitate the construction and dimensions of the thing found /actually: a compilation cho­sen by the artist/ with minute detail. The is an ideal programm for jacks-of-all-trade: take some rotten planks, smooth it somehow with a trim, cut it to size /fit it!/, make it ready by some plank across and go through it! By the way, it is not the way of Heritesz. Sometimes he varies substance - zebrano, strawberry, cedar-, pine-, or oak-wood, copper, brass, chromesteel. Sometimes he composes the fi­le-direction of wood into his works indicating the rhythm of horizontal, vertical and diago­­nal construction not only on substance but in substance olso. Naturally, "Naturalness is a transformation of a thing found also. Because a sawing-jack does not belong to artistic themes but it is good enough to confront geometrical fun­daments, constructive composing seriality. I say cofrontation because the jacks have al­ready chdnged for me. They could be tank-traps, elements of street barricades or symbols of an era. /Yours will never fall./ The "Curiosity, Mutation, Meditation" made me remember a story. When I first sow the variant of copper in his atelier I hardly could beleive my eyes. The massive pieces of the aurulent bundle-wood curved and benched. Constructivist was "unruly". Suddenly, got it up: the "original" one tied round with a cord was in the corner. The bundle, of the most dusty planks you you can find in the loft or in the cellar. It happened as follows: He found it. He untied the bundle, he measured the si­zes of each planks, he planned the curves of all details and then he made it of copper from piece to piece and bundle both one in the end. He didn't show this objet trouvé on his new exhibitions, /I proyed in vdin/, but let it simply in the corner. There was something frightening in this gesture. He rolled over tal­king to the people. He has a talk only with substance. I know Gábor Heritesz as such a constructivist sculptor who set his lyric-romantic behaviour free up till the time as he can find beduty in most daily thing or trash. And then comes his time. And that is in order. Budapest, 4 October 1991 Csaba Kozák

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