The Claim of Universality
About the works of Éva Köves – Art and Architecture 2.
The early works by Éva Köves were related to architectural spaces. I will never forget my first visit in her studio. Vis-à-vis the huge classicistic window of the studio in the „Strawberry-Garden” building of the art-academy’s mural department, Éva opened even more windows to a multi-layered space. Looking at the painting I was overwhelmed a boundless sensation. Twenty years passed until I felt once again this very special sensation when (on the occasion of the Monumenta event) I entered the hall of Grand Palais in Paris, which has been just colored by Daniel Buren’s glass-sheets.
Standing in front of Éva’s colorful painting, the geometria piana opened new and new spaces filled with complementary colors, and made me feel the same type of euphoria all along our academic years.
Later she reduced the constructivist spaces and changed to black and white. As if we would see the layered spaces in a photography with high contrast: rasters, bars, frames, grids, and, in between or behind them, the white space drifting to the infinite. Metaphors of the unlimited, the unbounded, or of the freedom, which gained existence between black bars and in frames.
One of her strongly featured paintings is made of construction-photographies of roof-bars of the West Station in Budapest (designed by Gustave Eiffel).
Then, around 2007, her paintings changed suddenly.
We do not see any more unfolding and growing spaces depicted by windows, constructions, grids and coordinates – a very new motive appeared on her images. Still, the change was not spectacular at all. It was rather essential.
Oh, watch, this is a coffered ceiling or maybe a door – I told myself standing in the exhibition space of Judit Virág.
The boundless white window-painting disappeared.
The plane was closed. The plane itself became (was transformed to) the absolute. On the surface we see very fine ornaments of geometric shape, like a musical theme – preludes. Utmost fine philosophical moments.
Ah, this is so Greek, so oriental, so universal… my own mind goes always East – an incorrigible orientalist brain – and here the plane surface has become the absolute instead of perspective’s games. There is no vanishing-point, no whiteness, and barely anything axonometric.
Just the fine … of grey with a little bit of colored jewelry. Many facades in Budapest have a similar geometric shape: the love of closed grey surfaces with geometrical, antique decoration: coffered walls turned to the street.
Later I got to know, that this motive was borrowed from a wooden door in Moscow.
Still, in my mind, this type of abundance of geometrical design is related to the chami (Cham in Arabic Damascus) geometrical handicraft tradition, where the most detailed compositions were constructed of nothing else but squares, circles and triangles, and their endless combinations.
The most modest marquetry makers refined these compositions during centuries on wooden boxes : no bots, no scrolls, no flowers. Prepared with meticulous care these algorithmic tables show the inner harmony of nature – we can read about this philosophy when Plato writes about his solids and the Idea, and later in Islamic aesthetics –, and rooted in non-figurative aesthetics of deeply monotheist faith and conviction in the cradle of civilizations.
Yes, indeed, this thought opens wide doors of the philosophy. Concerning geometric abstraction we can evoke Kazimir Malevich and his nearly mystical, avant-gardist notion of “pure sensation” in his Manifesto Suprematistic, the light functionalism of Bauhaus and further Mondrian, who was rooted in strict protestant traditions, the writings of Heisenberg, the nuclear physician, the non-figurative tradition of geometric shapes in Jewish art, or the Byzantine iconoclast arguments and John of Damascus writings, who was a fierce opponent of the iconoclastic movement. The figurative argument by Joannes Damascene was in long term in many aspects victorious, since the Eastern and Western Christian church during long centuries preferred the image of the human figure instead of merely abstract geometric patterns. Still the deepness of the non-figurative argument stayed alive. Maybe there is no other region in the world, where the most simple craftsman respected and insisted so much on algorithmic and mathematically refined compositions, as it happened in Damascus and in the chami motive of wooden boxes.
A big square is created of smaller squares’ and triangles’ segments, each big form contains a smaller geometric universe on the marquetry boxes, chess tables and furnitures and coffered walls. Each wooden box reflects the geometric refineness of Platonic philosophy. “The believers renounce idol-worship “ – as the locals say – and discover the beauty of nature, universe and divine creation in mathematics, written texts and science.
The meticulous elaboration is a sign of humility as expressed in beauty and artistic craftsmanship.
The motives on the wooden doors wandered. We find them in Europe and in India. If the door is heavy and big, there is no other way than building it from coffers: to construct a strong framework and to fill is with light wooden panels. Therefore it is plane and spatial construction at the same time. Here, on the door, genre of the relief made its big developments.
Beyond all this, the door is the constantly changing part of the building. Those parts of the church, the synagogue or the mosque, which are made of stone hardly change, but each time the building burns down, or it is just being renovated, the wooden coffer door is renewed, it is each time the “victim” of the fashionable woodstain and material handling. Its motives are more universal and still more difficult to locate as characteristic for one historical period and place. I try and try to analyze the style and age of the door coffers on Éva’s Moscow painting. It could be a Roman motive, like the ceiling of the Pantheon, it could be also Arab. Still the carpenter, who made the wooden door, could have even been a follower of Victor Vasarely, who was probably born so much later then him. Did the craftsman have the axonometry of the renaissance in mind or the seventies of twentieth century, while working on the object? Finally, I give up the art-historical analysis, when I find a carved stone-door made in ancient India, which is depicting a wooden coffer-door. Bauhaus people would have envied its simplicity of abstraction and minimalist reduction.
How shall I analyze the self-conscious, precise rhythm of Éva’s painting? What should be their best anchor-point? It is appealing us to enter a philosophical labyrinth – although the surface is simple.
Shall we think about / associate them with the Austrian, Hungarian or Czech architects’ historicism with the rich ornaments and their refined and clear handicraft?
Shall we associate them with / connect them to the geometrical ornaments on the buildings of Damascus, Baghdad or Jerusalem, which was quoted so often by nineteenth century’s architects, like Ludwig Förster, the German architect, who built the synagogue in Dohány utca in Budapest, or by his Viennese colleague Hansen and their followers? Meanwhile an other architect, Ödön Lechner created the slogan “Hungarians back to Asia ‘ and preferred to order Turkish-Persian or Hungarian flower motives and plants and curves into a fractal-like spatial experience of the visitor – Lechner being so much ahead of his time and creating modern mathematics or visualization in space – as we can see it on one of Lechner’s genious buildings, the Museum of Craft and Design in Budapest. Just a few decades later – at the dawn of modernist era – Adolf Loos declared in Vienna, that decorating buildings is the sin itself, and the empty plane surface remained.
All these local art-historical aspects are contained in Éva Köves’ repetitive geometric pattern and shapes, still we should not declare one of those aspects explicit exclusive. The philosophy of her works contains the worlds and realms of all the craftsmen, who made the small coffer boxes and the wooden doors. The unique and artistic individuality of Éva Köves does not strive for exaggerated subjectivity or for the enforced artistic spectacle, however, she allows the traces of time and mental movements to flow through her personality in the moment of creation to appear on the painted image.
After thirty years of mental exercise and repetitive creation, the collaboration with media artist Andrea Sztojanovits in the artist collective Monochrome Clack this practice evokes images, which we can not explain anymore.
I look at one of her latest paintings. The forms are squares, edgy and look like circles at the same time. Each detail contains a new universe. And still the image is so light.
The forms start to move in my memories. Like wheels, wheels of time – all this with ease. It is strange, but Éva tells me also, that the forms rotate in her memory and still join each other – all though this is a still image, a painting and no animated motion picture. The forms fly in my memories, allowing us to travel to remote places in space and time.
February 22, 2015, Budapest , R.E-H
