STRUTTURE PARALLELE
The summer season-closing exhibition of the Einspach & Czapolai gallery brings together two artists from different generations whose practices nevertheless share a number of important affinities. Strutture Parallele is not the result of a joint artistic program, but rather a meeting of selections drawn from the independent artistic universes of István Haász (1946) and Tamás Jovanovics (1974). The works on view do not directly respond to one another; yet their juxtaposition creates an opportunity for different aspects of “geometric thinking” to enter into dialogue within the framework of a single exhibition.
The title Strutture Parallele (“Parallel Structures”) thus refers both to the exhibition’s fundamental premise and to the formal character of the works presented. Although István Haász (1946) and Tamás Jovanovics (1974) belong to different generations and were shaped by distinct historical and cultural experiences, their artistic practices have developed along visual languages that can be understood in analogy with one another. Their careers have not intersected, yet their artistic trajectories and perspectives can still be interpreted within a shared coordinate system: as parallel structures that, while moving alongside one another, remain connected to the universe of geometric abstraction.
One of the exhibition’s focal points is the oeuvre of István Haász. Celebrating his eightieth birthday this year, the artist has, for more than half a century, produced one of the most significant bodies of work within Hungarian and international geometric abstraction. Through a selection of reliefs and wall objects spanning different periods of his career, the exhibition offers insight into the key questions that have shaped and sustained his consistently evolving oeuvre over the past five decades.
At the center of Haász’s art lies the relationship between form, space, and light. His works emerge from the elementary structures of geometry, yet they are never merely exercises in formal construction. Balancing on the threshold between plane and space, the compositions change in relation to the viewer’s movement: the play of light generated by surfaces, edges, and layers continually creates the illusion of new configurations. For Haász, the reduction of form and color never serves to narrow meaning; rather, it functions as a concentrated articulation of visual experience. The formal discipline that has characterized his work for decades has resulted in an autonomous visual system that is simultaneously connected to the tradition of constructive art and capable of transcending its classical framework.
While both artists’ approaches are closely related to the tradition of geometric abstraction, their reflections emerge from markedly different attitudes. Through the reduction of form and color, István Haász investigates the fundamental relationships between space, light, and perception. In contrast, for Tamás Jovanovics geometric order has increasingly come to appear, in recent years, as a system confronted with its own limitations.
For a long period, Jovanovics’s painterly thinking was rooted in the search for the essential form, a commitment to clarity, and an interest in metaphysical dimensions. In his early works, geometric structures followed the logic of the non-hierarchical systems of Minimal Art, where individual elements were organized into unified wholes as equal participants. In recent years, however, uncertainty within the system, exceptions that modify order, and forms of hybridity embedded within structures have gradually entered his work. The stable equilibrium of earlier compositions has increasingly given way to pictorial situations in which order appears not as a given condition but as a continuously evolving state.
In Jovanovics’s art, parallelism is not merely a formal phenomenon but also one of the fundamental principles of visual organization. Developed over decades, his line-based compositions arrange themselves into systems in which elements running alongside one another simultaneously generate order while making its fragility visible. The works on view may be understood as a synthesis of this evolution.
As a result, Strutture Parallele is ultimately not about similarities but about relationships. It is about the way parallel lines in geometry remain part of the same space without ever intersecting. The oeuvres of the two artists are connected in a similar manner. István Haász’s structures, sensitive to the laws of light and space, and Tamás Jovanovics’s more open systems, which explore the transitions between hierarchy and disorder, are neither continuations nor counterpoints of one another. Yet when works from different periods of their respective careers are viewed side by side, a broader horizon of geometric abstraction begins to emerge - one in which form can simultaneously embody discipline and freedom, permanence and change, system and experiment.
//Mónika Zsikla//
