“MIRRORS OF THE VOID”

“MIRRORS OF THE VOID”

I have twelve sentences. Talking about the thirteenth is my fourteenth sen-tence.

This is how one sentence gets piled onto the other. In the pile I am in control of the relationships created by the sentences at the most, something I am even unable to utter, but I’m not either of the sentence or of the word, even though both are in one’s possession. The relationships created by the sentences could at the most be described with sentences, however I haven’t, I cannot have enough sentences to describe these relationships. And it sounds as if I were saying that not saying anything is more: silence. Or as if I had said that more blank space remains on the paper than lines I could draw. There are not enough dots, not enough lines to completely fill the space. And if there were, there are no more dots or lines; space, however, will remain space.

In times immemorial lines and words must have been side by side. Nobody could have thought there was any relationship between them. Why does one think so now, and how long has one done so? If I didn’t carry the words according to my and other’s talk I wouldn’t be able to write down this sentence. Neither would I be able to do so if there was nothing to carry on. In fact I don’t write sentences but loop agreements. One should say perhaps, that the thought behind my words is common. I make others assert them-selves in me.

Exhibition: Galerie de Luxembourg – Luxembourg City (1993)

The text and pictures below are taken from the exhibition catalogue. You can find the integrality of the text and pictures in “Mirrors of the Void” exhibition catalogue.

A WORD, A LINE, I WRITE A SENTENCE (Text by Péter Nádas)

A word, A line, I write a sentence. Or does the sentence write me? I draw a line. But can I ask if the line has drawn me? I have four sentences. I have two questions which answer my two state-ments.
Who speaks in my sentence and who does the sentence speak to?
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that those speak in my sentence who don’t talk: wouldn’t I be able to say either more or less than as long as their silence spreads? Who would I be? And wouldn’t my speaking up be more than the silence touched in others? Would I be as much and as long as much and as long as I speak to someone else?

I have twelve sentences. Talking about the thirteenth is my fourteenth sen-tence.

This is how one sentence gets piled onto the other. In the pile I am in control of the relationships created by the sentences at the most, something I am even unable to utter, but I’m not either of the sentence or of the word, even though both are in one’s possession. The relationships created by the sentences could at the most be described with sentences, however I haven’t, I cannot have enough sentences to describe these relationships. And it sounds as if I were saying that not saying anything is more: silence. Or as if I had said that more blank space remains on the paper than lines I could draw. There are not enough dots, not enough lines to completely fill the space. And if there were, there are no more dots or lines; space, however, will remain space.

In times immemorial lines and words must have been side by side. Nobody could have thought there was any relationship between them. Why does one think so now, and how long has one done so? If I didn’t carry the words according to my and other’s talk I wouldn’t be able to write down this sentence. Neither would I be able to do so if there was nothing to carry on. In fact I don’t write sentences but loop agreements. One should say perhaps, that the thought behind my words is common. I make others assert them-selves in me.

Punctum- say those who speak Latin. They put the sensory experience of a sting or a bite into a word. The symptoms are actually burning on our body. They blow at them, cool them, put a compress on them, rub them, but only after long contemplation will they become something which, according to Euclid, has no parts. And similarly only later does the line represent a one dimensional geometrical basic formation which has not traverse expansion, because if those who speak Latin say linea, our first thought is a linen thread or the string anglers use; that’s where the measurement and later the notion of the stroke and the line came from.

No one can utter a word or draw a line without the sensuous experience, the source of common knowledge appearing behind it. And even if someone could, who would comprehend it ?

First the sensuous experience, then the object and finally, the notion which breaks away from the meaning it comprises in its from.

A living person stands not in a word or a line, but appears in the relationship. A verified past and a present made dubious. What reaches hack to the sensuous experience preceding words, reaches beyond notions. It touches the silence of others with its own soundlessness; personal silence sounds in this common one. A raw experience which does not have words as yet takes this way to converse with what we have not yet had a common awareness of. Artistic ability is only a possibility “to cash in” this human faculty.

The rest is insidious copying.

NOTHING (Text by Klára Hudra)

AFTER AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPANSION of art we had never witnessed before, we have arrived in the present which is dominated by a state of idle-ness. The fact is that the ideals of the avantgarde and progress which prevai-led in our century as well as the forces supporting modern art have been stifled for good.

Although postmodern has become a most suitable and fertile soil for a cer-tain kind of cultural indifference, artists have failed to find anything wrong with searching for their own traditions while looking for their identity.

Anselm Kiefer put it this way: I haven’t got the power to change anything, my only power is to see things with my own eyes and to offer this vision.

SI-LA-GI paints, he is an intermediary artist, a personality who has been an active participant and companion of the events ever since the 1960’s. Similarly to many recognized artists [ e.g. Cucchi, Polke or Kounellis, besides Kiefer referred to above ] he has remained a wanderer through cultures bet-ween East and West, and he extended his search for traditions, and this is an axiom of not only the post-modern but also the classics, for qualities exotic for us, the art of the Far East.

We can view his ouvre, naturally, according to the criteria of the 198o’s as Lóránd Hegyi did when he called our attention to the stations in which SI-LA-GI‘s search for direction from radical eclecticism to the application of the much more volatile generic and medial contents can be pinpointed, which, will finally lead to an individual mythology glittering in the many-colored light reflected by the materials and surfaces. However, this well trodden road could be much sooner considered as a free submerging, a search trying to avoid the required exercises, when ambitions are not exhausted by painting, making videos, constructing installations or the problems of the nature of photocopying.

The tools are of equal rank, the aim is not to try and push out the limits by force as in the case of conceptual art, but the interpretation of individual tendencies. The most typical feature of his works is that he does not try to cherish any characteristic marks of style or any emblems, his choices are much more event-like, he is interested in the possibilities of marking of a performance value.

SI-LA-GI clings only to certain motifs which constitute the string of speech for him, he considers the quality of the period according to which one work of art cannot be deduced from another. He clings to his own “archeological” finds, situations typical of Duchamp, just like to discoveries offered by photography and digital picture-recording. In addition he retains the forms of survival of the romantic idea of the lonely creator in his body-copies made mostly at the beginning of the 1980’s.

Modern art often equals talk about talk. SI-LA-GI doesn’t seem to he attrac-ted by that, he makes the construction of a personal system of commu-nication evident: that is he asks the questions. He scrutinizes the usual and at the same time unusual relationships. His paintings where he qualifies the given sight avoiding the heavy weights of tradition in a way that results in mo absence he takes possession of immediately are especially exciting. Thus his repaintings remain legitimate.

Besides his paintings, his installations, photocopy-mosaics and gestures avoid the “deviant” traps of opposing the recipient, he keeps his works in the aura of the aesthetic experience in a way that he does not fall into the trap of “workability”. The keys to his secrets are hidden in his desire for identity which can be described in a most simple way as the passionate desir for freedom of grand art.

We live in an age of idleness, lying low in a silence before the storm, and all this controls our artistic disposition. That is exactly why it is surprising when an artist gets grabbed by the desire to put his own relationship to art and his former activities under a microscope.

In this complex relationship SI-LA-GI, with one of his con stant motivating forces being the ideology of Buddhism, has changed his method of creation instead of changing styles. We may describe what happened through the eyes of a witness: Sabolch SI-LA-GI has changed in the past few years.

n his present exhibition, which is his first in Luxembourg this turn can well be pinpointed, here we can already speak about an attempt to draw some conclusions, a certain kind of desire for purity.

His almost kaleidoscopic world which dominated his past has been replaced by a very exact, almost puritanic method of artistic creation. One of the essential results of this method is his “wall-installations” entitled NOTHING.

The most important knots to untie in this work begin when studying the tangible ensemble of iron, photos and light-bulb-inscriptions- we moat ren-lize that this time there are no visual anecdotes or punch-lines.

NOTHING is a mysterious, paradoxical work in which the artist deprives himself of his message with the passion of a cartographer. Photography occupies an important position within the work, the symmetrical message on a fragile paper locked up in an iron picture mount does not leave anything up to the accident. Yes, we see what we see, the pathetic and truthless nature of copying embodied in wax figures, while on the other hand we sec n true and pure story, a sand-painting. The trace of four lines heading for the infinite doomed to disappearance, in the eternal sand. It perfectly expresses the unavoidable limitedness, the possession of a positive surface [the artist’s claim], its contradictory nature.

HALLhatatlan - duptic / silkscreen 150 x 178 cm - 1991
Time making / Ido készítés - silver gelatin photography / ezüstzselatin fotográfia - 30x40 cm - 1993
Untitled (Cim nélkül) - Rusted Iron - 163 x 70 cm – 1993
Very Hard
Inner Doors [Belsö kapuk] - Photo, rusted iron 70 x 100 cm – 1993
Nothing [Semmi] Iron, photos, color cells 522 x 93 cm – 1992
Intrinsic Value III [Lényegi érték] Chromate Iron 78 cm O – 1992/93
Intrinsic Value [Lényegi érték] - rusted Iron 73 cm O – 1992/93
Mirror of the Void - rusted, gilded iron, acryl on glass o178cm - 1992/93
Mirror of the Void - rusted, gilded iron, acryl on glass o178cm - 1992/93