Nyári István (István Király Múzeum, Székesfehérvár, 1992)

patterns could not have their continuations. The greatest loss is that we have not learned to find and appreciate the sprout which incidentally grows in this cultural wasteland. No one will take the path that is harder to walk and offers less fame is his act is not rewerded evon in terms of morals. This is why I consider exceptionally brave those who, in this vacuum, in this unsupported social-moral-aesthetic foundry still can melt virtues and high-level aesthetical demands. Some artiste seemjs to sublimate their passions, and burning at the highest temperature produces works that shine thye brightest. Would the conly rational achievement in this world be to step on a higher level of aesthetic expression? I can be blamed of contemplating the affairs of the world in terms of aesthetics only. One might say that this is a kind of "perversion", too, as it does not answer the basic questions of existence. Beautiful poetief visions do not answer the questions of meaningful everyday life, the impossibility of work or the hardship of getting integrated. What 1 experience is that during their processes of creative work, in the permanent state of eliciting inner doubts, artists get on higher and higher levels of self­­identification. It means but the creation of the subjective conditions of a sensible life, the discovery of harmony. The ways in which Nyári changes his Creative methods are symptoms of his self­­identification. One no longer finds the confrontation of reality and fantasticality, the duality of facts and illusions in his works. Having come to man’s estate, he creates works which express his subjective poetic images sharply, unambiguously, with and impressive artistic and aesthetic power. His last "psychological crime-story" was the painting "Nosferatu in the housing development", in which Nyári appeared in the mask of a vampire. Hungarian public encountered Nosferatu in Polanski’s film,"The Ball of Vampires". While in the thirties the Expressionist "Doctor Caligari" was the figure to represent the horror of Fascism, Polanski selected a blood-sucking phantom to typify the evil from the inside. Nosferatu’s power is in his murderous sensual passion. Nosferatu carries the centuries-old wisdom of indirect sensual experiences, anti-intellectual and irrational knowledge - the loneliness and suffering of knowledge and sin. Christian tratidion has done the most to include sensuality within the general notion of evil, and this notion still survives. It is paradoxical that even the over­­intellectualised ideal of the artists in the seventies rejected the basically sensual and irrational nature of aesthetic experience and expression. This tendency was at last abandoned by the post-modern attitude of these last years. Nyári selected the symbolic figure of Nosferatu to be his alter-ego. The end of this artistic period saw his first sculpture. It was a leather object of man’s size with its belly ripped up, its protruding bowels were tubes and hoses of household machines. The anatomy of human civilastaion; an anthropomorphic image of cultures which get less and less anthropomorphic. Ruthless art, but this time in the sense of a ruthless search of truth. The new wave of the eighties beneficially washed over and stylistically loosened up his oversized hyper-realistic gestures and professionalist painterly mechanisms. Nyári is "licenced" to use this style as at the Academy of Applied Arts he was trained to make street art, different genres of magazine graphics, posters, wrapping, photography, design and various techniques of drawing and typography - the codes of everyday speech that make pop-art have its renaissance or rejuvenescence. Similarly, one of the accepted devices of applied art is the free, uninhibited usage of linguistic-stylistic panels, which is more and more characteristic of fine art works. The traditional hierarchy of the branches of art, which holds an aesthetical, self- contained object more valuable than a simple object for usage, confronted and divided fine art and the art of designing. Design, provided it does not merely mean the designing of soapboxes, determines the whole visual image of a period and creates the scenery of an age in a unified style. On the other hand, the styles in fine art are designed and produced nearly the same way as industrial design, with the same principles and systems, not mentioning the huge machinery and industrial testing of the production and mediation of art and culture. But the new wave distances itself from the commercial phenomena that had earlier been accepted. Among Hungarian conditions Nyári is an unusually prolific artist. He put on show a brilliantly executed series of his "new wave" paintings together with the works of János Vető, Lóránd Méhes, Péter Nagy, László Nagyvári and Péter Forgács under the title "Dreamlike Pictures" at the Lajos Street Gallery in 1983 Nyári uses lots of colourful graphic elements, his stylised handwriting interlaces the visual structure with the means of music. The construction, however, suggests a kind of multi-rcflexctance, many times we find a " picture in the picture", the former representing the situations and figures of his earlier photo- and psycho­realism. But now they are viewed from a certain distance, rescored to the system of symbols of the new style, in a punkish or clownish fashion.

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