Jószay Zsolt szobrász (Hamilton AULICH ART Galéria, 2009)
It is nearly four decades that our lives have been running paralleled. I could follow his lifeline, his different cycles in art, the joy about each work that had been made, and the creation of his public space sculptures. I have been watching his silent effort, and the patient love fulfilled in his art creation from the very beginning. Also I have witnessed the determination, with which he forms signs, looks for the soul in the living material, while he is putting life into the lifeless substance. Meeting his new works is always an experience as if he showed his new-born baby with euphoric joy and parental care to the world. A new, single and unrepeatable world has entered the old one. In his works of art I have never searched for any art-historical parallels, or pre-concepts. Every occasion I was overwhelmed by an unutterable experience born in deep silence. The quiet sadness of his sculptures stepping over the presence, dreaming about the past or looking into the future would talk to the human spirit. If it is either a portrait suggesting youngish hope, or a tied-up, limbless figure trying to keep its balance, or a bust with an ethereal, archaic smile, or even a torso crowned with some canvas - the message is the same. “If you go down to the very depth of your soul, you will find the sadness mixed with happiness” - wrote Taitos. “Can you have happy days, if you Y JATEK, 1990, fa, 74 cm GAME, 1990, wood, 74 cm do not know sadness? It is there everywhere, in everything. It is in the foliage of the tree with falling leaves, in the lower losing its petals, in the sea-waves withdrawing at the time of ebb, and its is there in the farewell of the sun setting behind the hills. Sadness is in the heart of the mountains, too. They are sorry not to have grown up to the sky, and even if their tops did touch the feet of the skies, during the years their peaks have got worn and torn, and their colours have faded. That is what time does to you: beauty is also fragile, why would it be nicer to joys? .... It is human, too. The descent and the rise. As the sun and the seasons go by then they hug the stars again, eternal changeability is there in everything. It is in the human heart, in the moods and the circumstances.” Zsolt Jószay's sculptures are born by the marriage of changeability and unchangeability. They are children to the painful beauty of death, the inmost sanctity of the trees growing from the ground to the sky, and to the everlasting fight between human goodness and defencelessness. These sculptures, which he dreamt into physical substance are the passing symbols of our mortality longing for the eternal light. István Dobrik ? TANC, 1989, fa, 168 cm DANCE, 1989, wood, 168 cm JÓSZAY ZSOLT tel.: 0620 344 1 21 8 e-mail: ioszayzs@freemail.hu ZSÓKA PORTRÉJA, 1974, márvány, 25 cm ZSÓKA’S PORTRAIT, '1974, marble, 25 cm Zsolt EGYENSÚLY, 1988, fa, 35 trn | BALANCE, 1988, wood, 35 cm