HAPPINESS AND SUFFERING ARE SIMILAR, BOTH TRANSITORY I & II
100 x 70 cm 1997
I.
An old woman is sitting in a red dressing-gown with a white print, in a hospital room, before the supper she has begun. On her face, a comic New Year's mask apparently constitutes a grotesque contrast to her situation of human tragedy: the rapid spread of aging and disease and the commencing disintegration of the body. As if in alarm from the threatening present, she snatches at past joys and intimate games in her bewilderment by way of her memories. The mask, which at other times serves to disguise the personality, here, paradoxically, expresses it: one can cling for a moment to its firm materiality when confronted with the pressing reality of impersonal cosmic law. Via this contradictory effect, the mask is translated into a symbol of human existence. The personality within the framework of which we spend our life is itself a mask (persona), which simultaneously expresses and conceals the genuine nature of the existence. The picture records the moment when this contradictory quality of life - at once comic and tragic, concealing and revealing, absurd and realistic, individual and universal, everyday and extraordinary - becomes visible to the viewer. The old woman, her countenance expressing simultaneously intimate proximity and elusive, distant daydreaming, nevertheless, sees more than we viewers. She sees that one which will fuse the opposite ends of the spectrum once again, even if she cannot dare to formulate it, not to herself as yet: that there, approaching irrevocably, is - alas! - death.
Dr. Lajos Pressing
II.
Late summer garden fragment, when Nature has attained its evolution in the wake of struggle, delivers its fruits, and slowly begins to crystallize and turns to decompose. Within, an old man preparing to expire. His completely stiffened body is like a dried and withered shell, ready to molt. Around him, the traces of joy, the events of life and creation: perhaps it is even the smoke of the barbecue used last night which has left its impression upon the wall; a hammock which preserves the form of the body which earlier reposed within it, though it is now empty; upon the opposite wall, blackened objects, beginning to corrode. A chair in a half-state of disintegration; at centre left, the pedestal of a sculpture, from which the sculpture has disappeared; on a table, a cast-off newspaper, whose contents, even if someone has read them, have been washed away by time. Nothing exists for eternity, in itself: the experiences of pleasure and pain emerge and dissolve again in dependence on their conditions, and our entire world, in its incessant evolution, takes form and decomposes in exactly the same way. And nevertheless, in the pain of expiration, when life's energy abates, and the mind releases the maelstrom of phenomena, the silence becomes palpable in the background for a moment - the empire of the not-yet-apparent, from which, in the play of time, every fleeting phenomenon unfolds, and to whence they return. The gaze of the old man already indulges in the reveries of this other world, beyond origin and mortality…
Dr. Lajos Pressing
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