Time on the Tilt

My Conversation with My Pictures
people, who are re-dreaming this dream again and again. Among
the presenters of the light symposium we find artists and art
historians, writers, architects, physicists, mathematicians, cultural
engineers and so on from many different countries.
I quote György Kepes, who lived through the 20 th century
Attila Csáji’s light environment in the atrium of the Kassa Gallery, 2007.
and fought the battles of avant-garde: “it is time for a deeper
faithfulness”.
I am saluting the participants of the 7 th Light Symposium in
the spirit of invention and deeper faithfulness.
Thank you for hearing me out.
Attila Csáji
Chairman of the International Kepes Society
The most important autobiographical story for an artist is an interior
process. To me as a painter, it has been my con ver sation
with my pictures. This is what has helped me build a road
leading to my future. Let me specify this with an example!
I painted my Sign Grid Messages at the end of the 60s. My
sign-grid messages were in fact plastic structures representing
gestures that could be interpreted as a mime-dance performed
by a hand. Those gestures could be transformed with
the help of changes in lighting, and could evoke the fascination
of ancient cultures as they bore messages from a borderland
of order and chaos. They also provided a peculiar formula
of living, that of organic living that co-exists with matter bringing
it to life rather than defeating it. Each sign took its final
shape in communication with all the neighbouring signs in a
freedom evolving through the lived freedom of its environment,
creating a structure individually, yet in an organic bond
with other signs, and creating an order that is at once lived
and liveable.
All this takes place in the temporal sequences of the signs
being “inscribed”. Thus, visible time that can be divided up
into units of individual signs enriches the 3-D sight with another
dimension. This is how all four dimensions unite into
one single whole of, shall we say, co-existence. Such an approach
to my pictures simply clamoured for some more contribution
from time and light to be included as further agents of
interpretation. I applied some moving side-lighting producing
a sight which was mobilised by light itself. With the lighting
changed, the pictures started to breathe in the process of their
own “inscription”, not to speak of the corresponding changes
in their mood. Thus, movement became the ultimate tool in
creating metamorphic, moving pictures as well as the unfolding
of further interpretations by light, e.g. using paints sensitive
to varying wavelengths. My thinking paved the road not
only to light-art, but also to an ecological approach to the
world.
I devoted the last thirty years of my life to experimenting
with laser light. My experiments were supported by the Budapest
Central Physics Research Institute both instrumentally
and in other ways. At the end of the 70s I created the socalled
superposition method which proved to be unique in an
international sense.
When I first spent half a year in CAVS in MIT in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, my experiences reinforced my conviction that
even we, East-Europeans can offer novelties to the tried researchers
of MIT. I shall never forget their astonished glances
as we watched the variable motives of cell-crystals, or the
evolution of masks and heads transforming out of light interference.
Although CAVS or the Media Lab, venues of truly remarkable
results, were the very centres of laser-media research
world-wide, I can safely say that they did not have the faintest
idea as to how I had induced a physical phenomenon to produce
the series of metamorphoses I have just described. It became
obvious that my pictorial transformation method based
upon the coherence of laser light, i.e. the superposition method
and the light record were international novelties. This is
“Bull’s Nuptials”, 1964
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