Palimpsest: The Art of Bazil Duliskovich

by László Kertész

Bazil Duliskovich is, par excellence, a figural painter.

Hungarian fine art over the last decade has witnessed the strengthening presence of figural painting, and while professional circles have been continuing discussions about it, attempting to take an inventory of the phenomena of what is called realism, from the media-way use of images up to the historicising manifestations of radical conservatism, basically they have washed away the borders between the functions of mimesis and of figurality. Because it is not simply figural painting that revived in the 90s of the last century (which, actually, had not died) but a visionary, figurative painting intended for visualisation.

However unwise it is to treat the history of art as a history of generations, it is a matter of fact that Bazil Duliskovich is a member of such a generation that either discards painting as a form of art with no doubts or trusts in it and cultivates it without any aversion.

When in 2000, after three years of coerced interruption following his university education, he made his debut, he demonstrated an entire arsenal of his artistic means of painting. He appeared with expressive pictures of faceless and defenceless human figures and torsos that were locked in their bodies and single gestures and were deprived of any chance to experience the transcendent, as well as with portrays of deformed, tortured and distorted faces. He painted some of his pictures on wooden boards, sometimes chopping up his figures and compiling them out of various plains in a collage-way.

It was Sándor Molnár who selected the painter born in Nagyszőlős, Subcarpathia as his disciple at the University of Fine Arts, probably spotting Duliskovich’s anachronistic endeavour for timelessness that is also the essence of his own habit as a painter. But that could be the only contact point between their artistic methods because an approach building an entire oeuvre on a pictorial program, as represented by Molnár, is endlessly far from Duliskovich, who is a painter of inner senses and of pictorial effects partly withdrawn from conscious control.

Resettling in Hungary in 1991, the artist did not find his contact points to traditions in the current condition or traditions of Hungarian painting at that time but rather in an artistic direction taking care of and further shaping a specific tradition of figurality, whose most reputed and most characteristic representative was the London school that worked completely disregarding the mainstream of modernism for decades. That is where his special way of using figures derives from, an approach demolishing the integrity of body and face and the collage-way composition apparent in his first pictures. (Francis Bacon rightly refers to Picasso’s cubist figures which, by infringing the integrity of bodies, caused fine arts to branch out in two directions: ‘objectlessness’ and the complete liberalisation of depicting bodies.) Duliskovich’s early pieces of art are remotely related to the works of R. B. Kitaj, Francis Bacon, the American new painting or, for instance, Gino de Dominicis.

Another main source of Duliskovich’s art is the tradition mediated by icons and traditional Byzantine painting, i.e. by an art with an anthropomorphism deriving from the doctrine of Christ’s embodiment, with an ascetic ideal developed against the tradition of antique sensuality, with the spiritual abstractness of icons and with their static nature serving for contemplation. Duliskovich brought along all that with the visual culture encrypted in his memory during the first twenty years of his life spent in his homeland, to frequently incorporate those features into his artistic mother tongue unconsciously.

In 2001 he exhibited his series called Mindenféle és egyéb (All things and others). The collage-like layers in the pieces of that series already appeared as layers of plains within the same painting. His main means of expression, the carriers of his metaphysical distress and loneliness continued to be human figures. Everything else in his paintings (the objects, the background) served to support the infinitely reduced expression of a figure or a head. A few pieces of the series display ductile human bodies threatened to dissolve in their surrounding, their integrity becomes dubious.

At the exhibition Jövőkép (Future vision) in 2002 Duliskovich appeared with two series: the pieces of the series Átfestések (Repaintings) are results of continuous and conscious repainting. The layers on one another exert their effect as a montage with transparent plains placed on the top of each other. The acts of wiping out, covering and washing away rearrange the framework of figurality.

Applying that ‘palimpsest’ technique in his pictures as a creative method is decisive in Duliskovich’s art. Not only the montage-like construction of transparent plains but using an already commenced work as ‘grounds’ to repaint. However, his series Vegyes technikák (Mixed techniques), exhibited at the same time, stressed the ‘one-layered’, co-ordinated application of drawing and painting.

In the same year he also exhibited another significant series called A tizenhat hiányzó (Those sixteen missing). For that series he used a 15th century fresco about the forty martyrs of Sebaste, a part of which, including the figures of sixteen martyrs, was demolished in the 17th century. Duliskovich painted the missing figures, achieving the perfect synthesis of the fresco and his stylistic features. It is noteworthy that although he gave a further interpretation to the original context, he did not challenge it; his choice was not a postmodern gesture but such a way of using motifs that is typical of classical painting.

For the starting point of his pictures, Duliskovich chooses motifs from the most versatile contexts (mostly for their way of visualising a figure or figures) from a 15th century painting up to a postcard showing Vietnamese people drawing water onto a rice field or a toy figure for children. What he utilises as his model in his painting is a gesture expressed in the figure or perhaps a pathetic formula.

At his exhibition in 2003 he exhibited fictitious portraits under the title Short Human Stories. That series further enriched the arsenal of possible means of depicting a human figure in Duliskovich’s oeuvre. Based on imaginary characters he created human archetypes while successfully retaining their individualities. In line with his objective, the defiguration was reserved, and a series of sacred and profane icons was created. It should not be forgotten that a portrait always mirrors also what you think of the individual, as the case was in that series.

At his most recent exhibition called Ex Libris d’un peintre in 2004, he used palimpsest technique in combination with appropriation, by painting and drawing in books, playing with a possible dialogue with or through books and with the possible modes of interpretation and reinterpretation.

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Drawing plays an important role in Duliskovich’s art. It is the several hours of daily drawing studies during those long years at the secondary school at Uzhgorod that can be seen as his only real ‘master’ in drawing, which made him a perfectionist draftsman; a skill that method-wise impacts his painting art. His sublime drawing skill results in his strive for perfection and for carrying pictorial issues up to the absurdity. However, as he is also an experimenting painter, he paints series about the pictorial problems he finds exciting, those problems evolving into a continuous sequence.

He frequently draws on canvass, then covers the drawing with some colour, or vice versa, paints a ‘background’ that he overwrites by drawing with a brush. The mostly plain-like or muster-like background in his pictures suggest a calm constancy and timelessness that are often strengthened by the surfaces on his paintings that make one feel the destructive physical power of time as if one saw caducous, damaged frescos, ruined paintings soaking in rainwater.

While deliberately flowing paints reinforce the plain-like nature and icon-like abstractness of his paintings, in their figural context they mostly prompt associations with bodily injuries, recalling the tragic of the tormented corpus, the miraculous blood flowing from the wounds as well as the mystery of weeping and bleeding icons.

In the book-works of his series Ex Libris d’un peintre, Duliskovich deliberately relied on the sharp confrontation between the books used as palimpsests and his painting gesture. The multi-layered nature and the contrast of forms enjoy a particular emphasis in his latest series. The key issue in his most recent collection is the drawing within a painting, and the tension between graphic and pictorial elements. That conflict is just fortified by covers and, mainly, the transparent layers which sometimes create defects or absences generating dramatic tension, and other times enrich the layers of meaning through the complexity of surfaces. Some of those works could as well be closing pieces of the series about fictitious portraits while some other ones open the door to symbolic painting. It is an extremely rich collection unveiling the artist’s experiments and search for new directions; almost each piece of it could be the starting point for separate series.

Bazil Duliskovich’s art is a good example of how a characteristic individual career, a consistent self-development driven by some inner force can protect the artist against the pressure of a style or of the fashion; how mental consistency and the internal cohesion of a painter’s logic can help avoiding the traps of stylistic self-repetition to create a unique and autonomous art.

Duliskovich’s only real topic is, with a quotation from Francis Bacon, ‘the fragility of human condition’.