Orosz Péter (2001)
ötven év appears in the tenon and mortises and buildings in the billet of firewood of the REBUILT Schmiile. The other important characteristic of the sculpture is the title. Schmiile. the word can bo originated from the legendary of the Orosz family. In the colony where Orosz' parents lived there was a little Jewish boy, who was the example of misfortune and wreckness for Orosz' mother with his cap pulled onto his ears and teen-age clumsiness. That's why his name, Schmiile (probably Schmule. that is Samuel) became the dress fitted badly or something came nothing they said: schmiile. As the reconstruction of a log can only be imperfect, something was finally spoiled if it was cut into four parts, because it cannot be repaired, we may try it but cannot do that. The moving away of the tenon and mortise in the artwork is the schmiile itself. This is the tragical circumstance of rebuilding, which is also the essential component of Orosz' aesthetics. Orosz speaks about the impossibility, about something we have lost. At his first solo exhibition in 1983. at the Young Artists’ Club, besides the Schmiile. he exhibits an extended-necked log-violin, flashing the grotesque element also always present in his art. The exhibition at the Sudio Gallery in 1984 brings him the repute as a sculptor. He puts on show ladders, slingshots and crowns of thorns. An earial ladder for those who can take of without it, too. This wood-carved, winged Ladder queries its own sense, by the way its rungs grow thinner moving upward. His Earthly Ladder, dated 1979, shows the shaping of the fidding. here the surface burnt black means death at Orosz, in this case the tragical limits of life on Earth, while at the also patinated Schmiile it involves the Holocaust, too. The solvability or unsolvability of the impossible concerns Orosz. The question raises: is it worthy to walk through on his thorny ladder. while in the meantime we can interpret it as stations of the cross. He made a tiny ladder years before in the army, which was caned with the help of a "spoon-machine of 68 sample". This was an absurd form, just like the squirrel's ladder exhibited here, of the narrow-lined ladder, among the rungs of which one cannot take a step. It may remind us of the parable with the eye of the needle for the simple reason of its form. His arched ladder is the Sisyphean task itself with its semicircular arches bending backward to the earth. At the same time we may interpret the ladders, as an ensemble, as the varied ways of individual and collecive lifes. Choose what you want. His crowns of thorns, the honey locust make us associate to social criticism. Among his twelve crowns of thorns there is a triangle-shaped one recommended to the Lord, another one, with cut off stocks inside, is offered to the party secretaries. Certainly, at that time he did not dedicated it directly. And there is also one made of barbed wire, citing the 20th century. At the same time they suggest the twelve sta- Hasítás / Cleaving, 1980 II