Lost Eden (2000)

from which further advance was extremely difficult. There were numerous attempts at harmonizing old motifs with new forms, and even experiments with casting small figures in bronze. Geszler worked considerably in organizing the Kecskemét Studio's programs. In 1996-97 she completed a successful exhibit project with the members of the Terra Group, the title of the project being "Letters and Writing on Clay." One of the finest pieces of her exhibited works is a commemoration. Flommage a György Kurtág is an irregular porcelain cube with reticulated edges, on which there is a silkscreened picture of the orchestral score barrels - Utamaro's Works 1998 - or a mass of plumbing pipes covered by a dense net. In the works in the Utamaro's Tears Series 1998 the contrast in the pictorial elements of the surface crosses over to the form as well. As a contrast to the József Sárkány The first works of this type - Portrait in honor of M. A. 1989, Four Portraits 1991 • were chamotte sculptures in which the basic form was "dressed" with a rustic surface, gauze dipped in clay was twisted tightly around to tie the figures in a bundle. These "mummified," lifeless figures were very quickly changed, however The 1994 Double Portrait speaks of the deterioration of external and internal balance, of unity, and of the whole. Tension is increased to the extreme in these expressive figures who, having lost their staticness and stature, lie in a heap twisted into themselves. Form has lost its original structure; the figure, the person, merges with omnipotent pain and tragedy. This path has reached its end, and cannot be continued or compounded. Parallel to these works, Geszler also experimented with silkscreening on the surface of the puppets. Appearing again on the surface of forms poured on porcelain are the gardens, cranes, ruined plants and factories, and the lonely bench. At first these retain the curtain motif, as in the blue, hand-painted - not silkscreened - 1992 Lonely Bench, or the works in the 1993 Poetry of Industrial Landscapes series in the NKS collection, salt-glaze porcelain works with silk-screened images. For me these ceramic works also testify that the artist - despite the undisputed aesthetic and professional value of these works - had reached a point in her work by György Kurtág, Hommage à Geszler György. In the same year Geszler became acquainted with the works of the Japanese woodcut artist Kitagawa Utamaro. It may have been the liberated, live vibrant power of his works that restored faith and strength for Geszler. Strength to accept the unacceptable, to survive. To attempt to present the beautiful along with the ugly, or to try to find the poetry in the latter. These contrasts coexist and clash in Geszler's most recent sculptur es. The central defining motif in these works is a female portrait from an Utamaro woodcut, which make a peculiar, surrealistic connection between the pictures and twentieth -century industrial structures. Factories whose chimneys point upwards like cannon organic, arched form of the stylized figure, a geometric body is placed at the head, and at the place where the initially regular form should later turn into a structure living a life of its own. The body itself is saturated with life. Wavy impressions and sharp breaks and reticulations break up the surface. The lines of the picture emerge from the plane and cover the entire body. Strong intense colors appear in the wood or salt-glaze firing. Hommage à Utamaro 1999 is an outstanding work from this period. Blood-red glaze is dripped on the cracked broken body, with a blurred, faded drawing of a 20th-century factory and an 18th-century portrait emerging from underneath the glaze, while the slighted tilted head is crowned by the ruins of a building. Geszler's most recent works no longer use this baroque, crowded composition. The patterning and motifs of the body are simplified, thereby becoming even more brutal and suggestive. The headless body ends in a mutilated neck. The picture of a solitary plane dominates the surface. Underneath it is perhaps the blue of the ocean and the red of the Japanese islands. This work was made in the spring of 2001. However, today, half a year later, the enormous crack toward which the plane is flying on the left side of the figure is shocking. The plane and the tower are new elements in Mária Geszler's motifs. The plane, looking down from which the huge oil tankers on the island's coast looks like tiny sparkling coins, and the cooling towers - she writes - link a decade of attraction, awe and horror. "Their solitude shakes me; I stand in their enormous shadows and listen to their breathing and humming, their shapes stretching toward the sky -1 hold out my arms and, almost flying, plummet like a bird into their depths." Again and again the feeling of solitude and loneliness takes power. Man's isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability. The lonely bench and the populous park without people are unattainably distant, while the enormous factories full of machines, and the pipes connecting everywhere, are inseparable. There is enormous tension between the world which is wished for and the world which is real. We are dwarves. Just stone pieces on the side of the road, on which our tiny sign remains. Petrified pieces of a broken world. The last picture in the catalog is a blue porcelain disc, into which a mass of abandoned shells of clams and snails is sunk. This is a piece of the edge of the endless ocean.