Color to color

Space displayed through color is at the center of my focus.

The basis of my current series is light, the colors of the rainbow, clouds, flowering trees.
With the sky as a backdrop, the flowering trees transform into simple splotches of color before our eyes.
They blur from either the proximity or the distance.

Human perception ranges from the extremes of focus and vagueness. Our vision is occassionally razor sharp while sometimes the tired eye is unable to focus on a whim. In spite of the mysterious spectacle, certain details become perceptible on a more subtle level.

On my paintings, I record that special transitional state when one shape is either evolving or disappearing, fading away next to another. We are simultaneously seeing a specific flower, branch or cloud; consequently the image provides something that can be interpreted, something that gives the experience of recognizing a shape; at the same time, that same plant, cloud or branch merges into a diverse, colorful splotch of light.

On individual paintings, losing their color in the glare, the flowering branches turn into shadows in the foreground of the bright background. Losing their uniqueness and comprising a monochrome surface, they merge into a monotonous mass. They frame the free path of the eyes, inhibiting „vision” so that the spectator can only take part of the flash of the sky, of the horizon in a fragmentary, mosaic fashion. The bright splotches appear rather like a mirage than a washed together shadow or a close-in view that had turned into a pattern or a motif. The flowers are alive, colorful, fragrant and illusory. They bear their ephemeral nature upon themselves as a stigma.
I consider artistic expression a meditative state as well.
In consequence, my paintings are created through a process of simplification.

Often, I determine the simplification process well before it would become a completely parsed geometric shape, a permanent, pure idea rising above mere experience.
I consider it important that the unaware gesture remain on the painting in a subjective element capacity.
This is how my paintings straddle the boundary of the figurative and the abstract.

Elements appearing in contemporary art that I consider important in reductionism:
– personal and reconfigured figurativism, the presence of my signature and hand movement in the development of the colorful spot
– striving for the essential
– seeking immaculate form or color conditions
– the texture of the work is less important, the materials appear at a more refined level of quality
– reduction is in close correlation with complexity, the world can only be imaged with simplification
– a tool of concentration, playing a role in making ideas expressable
– it is not minimalism because there is no subtraction from meaning. It evokes a series of reactions, analogies and associations in the spectator.

Simplification also enables free reign to the internal visionary abilities of the spectator. It does not force anything, just provides an arena to connect the symbols, colorful spots and lines on the painting with the spectator’s own, rich internal world.

In my creative process, I am also modeling a peculiar aspect as interpreted through my vision within a type of philosophy.
My method as a painter and my process of personal awareness can therefore be made analogous with each other.

The relatively fluid material is placed on my canvasses in delicate layers.
The multiple layers of thin paint float on top of each other as delicate materials.
A shape assumes and loses a form or defined shape with each color and becomes a mirage, becomes relative.

Step by step, man gets further and further in his thoughts, in his real story. He gains ever more insight as he „sees clearer and clearer.”
Life is a compilation of a colorful space, stories, motifs and events. The so-called concentrations of transformations, points of reference can be the outlines of sure-handed movements, clearly audible insights of space.

…

Ágnes Kontra
Budapest 2013 November