Orbán Attila (Dorottya Galéria, Budapest, 1995)

“Few people realize nowadays that painting exists at all (when in fact never before has it exist­ed in such elementary form).” What Christian Dotremont wrote in 1954 has growing relevance today. We have lost the abil­ity to see colours and signs. This is a strange contrast. The intensity of visual and colour effects with which we are now being flooded has been unequalled in the history of mankind. In our flats, which are packed full of designer items, we surround ourselves with textiles and carpets of loud colours, cloth­ing and books, magazines and reproductions; and we spend much of our time sitting in front of our TV set, halfblinded and half-hypnotized, stuporously suffering the indigestible visual poisons of colours and forms taking effect in our souls. But parallel with the unstoppable invasion of our entire world by professional design, people watch the archetypal symbols of their existence with increasingly dull senses and awareness, standing in front of the signs directing the course of their lives more an more alienated, lost and confused. Because a true picture is a sign-post. All true pictures carry spiritual energies. A picture, if it is a good one, opens a window to the finer dimensions of our spiritual world, which are nev­ertheless more full of reality and life. True paintings, therefore, resemble alchemy, along with the verbal and vocal arts: poetry and music. Not every painting deserves to be called a win­dow, the same way as not every painting deserves the title of alchemy, either. Only those paint­ings are worthy of these distinctions, which can open up and peel off the skin of a world bound up in space-time; which can eat away the rock-hard walls of the laws of nature; and which can point us to our final home. Attila Orbán’s paintings are the alchemical operations of light. The space, which envelops the fundamental signs of a primordial perspective, is heavy and saturated. This space seems to consist sometimes of the wind-streams of the tundra, sometimes of sea-water, but mostly of lava: as it glows and sizzles, it resembles the sulphur of the alchemists; and this fire — like Heraclitus’s fire — “at one measure flares up, and at another measure extinguishes itself”... Attila Orbán is a conjuror of spiritual dimensions. Sometimes one cannot help feeling that the theme and the background in his pictures swap places. Rather than assuming a subordinate role, the background has an evocative power which equals, to say the least, the effect of the main motifs. However, it would be wrong to suggest that any of the — usually black — figures of the foreground was insignificant. Similarly to his great predecessors in Hungarian culture — Béla Bartók who looked for the pure source for his musical motifs and Béla Hamvas who discovered the primary logos-power of words -, Attila Orbán, too, tries to track down that primeval and elementary sign-language, which has kept the conjured spiritual energies unspoiled for thousands of years. This language is universal. It makes no difference whether the fundamental words of existence are uttered by a North-American Red Indian or a hunter of the tundras in the Ural-Altai region; equally insignificant is whether any of the recurring motifs was actually based on an ancient African masque or the graffiti on the wall of a Siberian cave. What matters is the level of our self-knowledge onto which they open a window. Today, “at the advanced stage of the Apocalypse” (Béla Hamvas), the criterion of artistic credibility is this: What purifying powers can it evoke from the dimensions behind the conscious mind, and at what intensity can it mediate the mobilizing forces with the help of these powers. In my opinion, Attila Orbán has completed the first phase of his artistic course. He has not made a single brush-stroke to offend the criteria of artistic credibility in this phase. His pic­tures clearly carry the promise of the future. It is the alchemic process of purification, of purg­ing away the waste, that the first period of his art points to. We have no way of knowing whether he will have the power to fight it out all the way against the hostile currents of the Zeitgeist, as promised. But the fire is evidently still glowing. Antal Dúl Translated by Zsuzsa Gábor

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