“Emptiness is not nothingness.”
In Sándor Molnár’s painting, the monochrome image is never simply a surface covered with a single colour. For him, the “empty” image represented the culmination of a long painterly and spiritual journey: a state in which visible form is reduced to a minimum, while the meaning of the image becomes as fully charged as possible.
One of the formative experiences on Molnár’s path towards emptiness was a boat journey across Lake Balaton. Travelling from one shore to the other in dense fog, the visible world almost completely disappeared before him. Only the homogeneous field of fog remained, while the presence of the water and the sky could still be sensed behind it. The experience later became a painterly problem: how can an image be emptied of form without its meaning becoming empty, while preserving its sense of fullness?
The exhibition traces the possibilities of monochrome painting from the earliest work in the series, dating from 1961, through the Principium paintings of the 1980s, to the whitest works of Molnár’s Sunjata period in the 2000s, mapping the trajectory that leads from monochrome painting to the concept of emptiness.
For Sándor Molnár, the “empty” image was not a beginning but an endpoint: in his own words, one of the final possible steps of artistic language. Monochrome painting, therefore, was not simply a form of reduction for him, but a sustained exploration of the relationship between colour, light, the painted surface and meaning.
//Mónika Zsikla//
