Béla Szilárdi - In the Wilderness of Expression

Béla Szilárdi is not loyal to some singular ideal of style—or rather, to style ideals in the plural—but above all to painting itself (deliberately avoiding the word painting); To the very act in which he seems to relish the mind’s aggression toward matter. In plain terms: after the monograph about him was published, he quite simply abandoned his former painterly self (that robust stylistic kaleidoscope) and hacked his way into a new thicket (and we might even take ‘thicket’ quite literally here): into the dense wilderness of gesture, momentum, transcription, expression, and even rhythm, where facture and structure can almost no longer be separated, since facture interprets structure and vice versa. The basic form—could it be anything else?—is the simple brushstroke. Consequently, everything that realizes itself as aesthetic value follows from the organization of the surface, from its tirelessly filled, overwritten structure. This structure—as mentioned—carries the breath-fine plasticity of facture, naturally once again in the service of structure. It reinterprets and recharges the signature of the hand with new meaning, a mark that modernisms had all but tossed aside. In short, natural points of reference, if at all detectable—lie somewhere in the fields of association… So what we have here is a completely new Szilárdi, one we have never seen before, one he himself did not previously wish to appear as, and yet—even with this in mind—we may still call it a kind of self-discovery. His obsessive attachment to vegetal ornamentation delights in the possibility and beauty of gesture within the theme. Through tireless elaboration, it demands a kind of exuberant accuracy that is, of course, no longer nature but painterliness. And despite its exactitude, it remains—spirituality.

//Text by László Fábián//