Katalin Aknay: And Yet – and Still Not



In the beginning, Lajos Csontó painted letter (initials?). ... Initially, he presented these on small boards with hard lines made with brush and paint, repainted several times. It was a sort of earthy, “healthy” form of painting; the letters could be read together a little irregularly – these were not truly linguistic signs, rather stamps, which pressed themselves into the eye of the spectator with their welded screen.

Then came a seemingly sharp change, text-images appeared in pretty oval frames; the decorum was only visible inside the frame, what remained of the art of painting was thinking in serial terms.
At this point, a marble magnified individual letters from the background of the lifeless text, which, if read together, formed a text: and yet – and still not (Bolt Gallery, September 1997). Through the magnification, tautologically, Csontó smuggled meaning into the text-background treated and interpreted as an ornament, an image. The assertions annulled (or, from another aspect, reinforced) each other in the same way visual representation conveyed it to us.

When after a lengthy silence Csontó returned with the exhibition I Understand Everything, Dad, (Vintage Gallery, November 1999), in my view, the sharp change and the surprise envisioned in the new „scheme” of the relationship of text and image was not merely apparent. The continuous relationship with the text and its image was reflected here. As if Csontó had found an answer – although temporary – to the relevant problems he had been concerned with, in which it is not easy to discover the road that lead from the initial “stuttering” to this formally and technically elaborate figurative speech.In Csontó’s square-shaped photos the banal contradiction of and yet – and still not is tamed into contradiction or images presenting other linguistic configurations, for example, personification.

What do we see?

First of all, an invitation with the above mentioned title. What can this be? A clear voice in the ether – as the commercial says – or the rare currency of personal and honest sentences, a late confession to a parent, or perhaps a game, or all of these at the same time, or neither of these?

Art – regardless of trends – is working on finding an adequate form of expression for ideas, feelings, problems. For Csontó, image and text are both important – the way image and sentence can interpret each other according to the descriptive logic of language, the meaning of a sentence strip placed in front of an image of ambiguous origin, and the presumed narrator of these images. It is obvious that in Csontó’s case the spectacle is not organized randomly. The tools of technical realization are “ancient” pictures manipulated by computer: reminiscences, or, if it wouldn’t sound high-brow, I’d say archetypical images. These photos are highly readable, their narrativity is popular and they unfold familiar situations, which obviously owes to reflexes cast aside by mass communication. This familiarity seems to reflect an old method, the projection of image and text onto each other. And even the possibility of a classic, art history-based answer is hidden in the way these explain and complement each other, or hide contradictions. 
It was 16th century emblematic literature that used the combination of image (icon) and textual explanation (lemma), and its partly logical, partly pagan-mythological-magical functions have opened a field of association that left the interpretation of the emblem open in spite of the fixed form – while the image and the idea were nevertheless forgotten. Since these problems were just as enigmatic as their interpretation was culturally coded, they gained incredible popularity during the century that followed. Everyone knew what to think if  “love“ was written above fire and “fidelity“ next to the woman sitting in an arbour.

Although Csontó does not necessarily start from this consideration, he nevertheless displays a “media-conscious” mutation of this imagery tradition.
There is another possibility of interpretation, which does not approach Csontó’s photos from still pictures, rather from moving pictures, and which partly explains the intentionally light, private banality of these pictures. The neutral yet very familiar images of the ship swimming out of the frame, the motorcycle taking a left turn or the moving truck all record a single moment of motion and time, as if they were frames cut out of a film.

Patience, which appears sitting on the horizon above the head of the motorcyclist, the ominous ribbon covering the left eye of the woman holding a flower, which says: „False fidelity” and the tense face with pressed lips: “I do good”, we do not search its origins. It might be a provision for life from Father, personal experience, a late explanation, to which we all nod and memorize its lessons.