Time on the Tilt

asically by this circumstance alone. I tended to doubt words,
slogans turning into their opposites, an overly rapid accommodation
to the status quo, an order much too tough, a dabbling
kind of chaos, political or artistic movements, everything.
Meanwhile, I also nursed an openness, a sincere curiosity. It
was a homespun truth for me that we must not cram reality
within the limits of our understanding. Instead, we must expand
those limits so that we can embrace with an open
sensitivity all the new images of reality and the world produced
by research. Such an approach is by definition wide open to
any Avantgarde. I had learnt that where we initially saw only
chaos we could easily see coherence provided we changed
our approach. A coherence that was important enough to point
to the future.
But over and beyond all this, I felt strangely certain of my
wish for a VITAL KIND OF ORDER, one that helped me live. It
was precisely this wish of mine that was hugely reinforced by
my acquaintance to Béla Hamvas. It was he who helped me
realise that what looked like ruthless order from the outside
was in fact sheer chaos. During one of our conversations he
pointed out that one feature of our century was the spread of
a new barbarism which had erupted vertically, from the depths
of society rather than those horizontal onslaughts of barbarism
thousands of years ago. The new barbarism flooded not only
society, but also its art. This is why along with the “modern”
we also needed some things that were “un-modern” in their
essence.
I had never been a fan of Béla Hamvas’, but I knew he was
a man of exceptional value and sensitivity. For me he was a
catalyst more than anything else. I had made his acquaintance
at Petrigalla’s place in Vécsey St., a smoke-filled pad bustling
not only with freedom but also the odd bedbug. Later on,
I paid many visits to him with friends or on my own. He called
on me in my studio several times, and sent me a letter of apology
whenever he was unable to attend a vernissage of mine.
His first visit to my studio occurred after my show at Petrigalla’s
place. On seeing my expressive, Surrealist paintings he
asked me whether I was aware of what forces my paintings
were setting in motion, and whether I was able to handle such
forces? Although his comment was critical rather than appreciative,
I was not at all hurt. He did not mean to hurt me. Rather,
he wanted me to give it all a thought.
He made his most astonishing comment in 67, when I showed
him my first Sign-Grid paintings. He was silent for a while,
just looking at them. Then he said this: “These are works extremely
Greek in spirit”. I knew that coming from him, those
were words of serious praise but I could not exactly figure out
what he was trying to convey. I looked at him clearly at a loss
for I failed to see any connection between the Greeks and my
Sign-Grid paintings. As he stood there engulfed in his thoughts
and still looking at the pictures I felt in my bones that his comment
had been meant in serious appreciation. He must have
recognised immediately that what he saw was no mere calligraphy
but something infinitely more complex in spite of its
elementary simplicity.
Then I said: “My Sign-Grid paintings are children at once of
doubting, of freedom, and of order”. They spring from a gesture
arising from the borderland of orderliness and chaos. They
are at once immensely individual and universal. Each Sign-
Grid is a compact structure, but also one that can be broken
down to individual units. Each unit is an autonomous being, an
autonomous sign which, however, links up to its surroundings
influencing it without destroying it. As I was explaining to
Hamvas the freedom, the order, the internal world becoming
external, things that my Sign-Grids paintings were trying to
express, sudfdenly he nodded: “With the Greeks the momentary
is always included in the eternal, and to them magical
and logical thinking are not two, but one.” With those words
he considered the matter closed.
His comments were hugely inspiring. He supplied me with
manuscripts of his writings from his “Five Undelivered Lectures”
to his “Scientia Sacra” (Sacred science). The latter was
still in my possession in 1968, the year of his death. When
I returned it to his widow, Katalin Kemény, she said that that
particular manuscript copy was about the only one she was
absolutely certain of retrieving.
“Sign-Grid XXVI.”, 1970.
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