Katarína Szanyi

Katarína Szanyi comes from Košice though has been closely associated with Ostrava for more than twenty years. In her paintings and drawings she examines the relationship between surface and depth, fragment and whole, concrete and abstract. However, she views these polarities in an unexpected way. She does not work with them as attributes of distinct dualisms, but sees them from the perspective of a whole that is framed by these extremes. She then “personifies” reality in its entirety by means of the whole or part of the female combined with scraps or (macro)details of other realities. Making the shift from polarity to totality of vision she is helped by the sfumato atmosphere surrounding and absorbing living and non-living details often to the extent that it would appear that the artist is deliberately paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom “man is entirely in things and things in man”. The result of this concentrated painting is an organic whole comprising an amorphously poetic crucible of matter and light-coloured atmosphere.

Light as a unifying principle has played an important role in Szanyi’s work since the end of the 1990s. A milestone in this respect is her cycle of paintings from 2003. In works such as Tajná agentka / Secret Agent, Pod / Beneath, and Něžný stisk / Gentle Squeeze (all created in 2003) she first managed to achieve the internally compact visual unit referred to above in which the previous flickering oscillation between detail and whole, surface and depth, attains new visual qualities and complexity.

The catharsis of the first creative peak is manifest in the next period, in which her expressive language is transformed under the influence of motherhood and moves in the direction of more concrete feelings. The essentially female experience of this period was drawn upon in paintings featuring breast pumps or electronic baby monitors, and here too the primary motif is often transformed and softened by means of a change of point of view. The tension between plastic utilitarian “support equipment” and the intimate relationship of touch between mother and child in works from 2004 and 2005 simply emphasises the previously characteristic “femininity” of her expressive language, in which the momentary relationship between the external (here personified by “objects” – Breast Pump, 2005) and the deeply intensive relationship (Malá, velká / Small, Large, 2004), i.e. again between the surface and depth, is played out in a sphere defined by a sensually revelatory/veiling experience. It seems that this concept of the external is also reflected in the recurring and ambivalently presented thematisation of veils, curtains, linen drapery – that which veils in order paradoxically to reveal more. The “levitating” coats, dresses or suits featuring in paintings from 2008 to 2010 feature, as well as a different articulation ranging from a more expressive style (Blue Death, 2010) to a Šímovian hazily luminescent style (Šimamoto, 2010), echoes of surreally subliminal sense of insecurity and threat accented in the contradiction between the floating “overcoats” and the absence of that which is inside, i.e. the bodies, which gave these “packages” shape and meaning.

In the paintings from 2010-2013 Szanyi described a kind of imaginary circle and by deviating from her previous more narrative painterly concept returned to work with the fragmentation of motif and its more complex layered repetitions. Through this “disintegration” of the early larger wholes she began to explore the possibility of blurring the boundaries between the (non)specificity of implication and the abstraction of impression (Početí / Seal, 2013). Clearly as a consequence of these investigations she managed to define the maximum capacity for repeating fragmentation. The outermost boundary of this crumbling of motifs is the acrylic Celá moje / Completely Mine (2010), in which the visual composition almost dissolves into a diminutive sequence of partially repetitions via a template of sprayed “drawings” by hand and palm. In other paintings the atomisation returned to an auxiliary level underlining or grading the central motif. Through the abundant use of spray paint over stencil and work with amorphous colour backgrounds the artist again expressed her main themes from the other side, namely the unifying relationship between depth and surface, which in a simple way she had already articulated in her large-scale enamel entitled Šli spolu / They Went Together (2010), influenced by the sudden death of the writer Jan Balabán. Here for the first time she pushed the huddled female figures to the end of the painting and opened up most of the surface to a lyrical, hazy emptiness drinking in and mixing grey stains. The paintings Zrcadlení / Mirror Image and Splývání / Blending (both from 2013), in which through subtle, mutually overlapping colour veils Szanyi arrives at a visual expression of one of the basic paradoxes of painting, i.e. the conflict between the facticity of the surface and the ability to non-mimetically create an impression of coloured depth, are similar in effect.

What previously seemed like a minor leitmotif (Buddha, lotus, etc.) now, in the light of more frequent work with the emptying out of the centre of almost abstract pictorial surfaces (Čínské ráno / Chinese Morning, 2010, Opřená o mraky / Leaning Against the Clouds, 2012), seems like a more and more important inspirational source of her visual language, in which Szanyi re-evaluates previous impulses and shifts our attention to a more general and yet structured or layered style, in which, as well as female sensuality, a more important role is played by what through this sensuality the veil of being can remove in favour of testimony – perhaps only intimacy of the highest degree – regarding the depth of the apogee and the emptiness of completeness.