This evening we are present at not a beginning artist’s exhibition but at a creator’s one behind whom there is a serious professional past but arriving from another branch of art: he has created as an architect so far and his interest in co-arts led him into the direction of painting. Today he is showing a selection of his latest paintings at his first exhibition as an artist. The question arises: why does he paint? Why this? How did the idea come? Why does an architect start painting?

The best answer to this question may be given in Heidegger’s ’The Origin of the Work of Art’ which is valid even today. He examines the relations between the branches of art and defines the theoretical bases of ’the conditions of crossing’ between the branches of art. It is made through drawing a parallel between a painting and a building, that is, between painting and architecture. In his work ’the Origin of the Work of Art’ Martin Heidegger suggests a philosophically common denominator, an essential identity of two different works with different genres and different formal-structural viewpoints. There are more than two thousand years between the two works therefore the view of world, philosophy and the spirit of the age mediated by them absolutely differ.

This equivalence is based on the identical role of the works of art played in the exploration of the truth. Heidegger, differing from the traditions, approaches to the work of art not from the direction of beauty, message etc., but from the direction of the truth. His central thought is that independently of the fact that whether it is a poem, a picture or a building and independently of intellectual position, formal appearance, era, genre or style; the work of art does not tell or mediate the truth, but the truth is activated in the work.

In Béla Kárpáti’s strongly-coloured paintings the earlier phases appearing by the overlaps of the many layers painted on each other give meaning to his composition, the picture is in continuous moving where the different layers encounter, while instead of the totally painted background the canvas appears in some places. The picture appears as a visual dialogue between the layers, which is going on before us, and we may see as the surfaces communicate with each other on their own language. The forms floating in the space, the edges of which take forms somewhere more resolutely, somewhere freely, the visual mappings of an elusive phenomenon in a constant change : the lyric but accurate draftings of the painter's endeavours. Certainly the formal similarity is not unnoticeable between the movement by Pierre Soulages and the group of Hungarians around him in Paris; eg. Judit Reigl, Simon Hantai, Kamill Major, and Endre Rozsda also belongs to this group. It is not about copying or imitation, but the expression of the truth in such a form. And similarly to the works of the others mentioned above, the situations offer an ambivalent, versatile interpretational opportunity by the movement of the surface in Kárpáti’s paintings. With the gestures he is able to show motion, floatation, tension, the change of processes, the rhythm and roots of existence on his canvases. Exceeding his personal starting point his works are the visual mappings of the senses of general human contacts and struggles. These are pictorial traces of different states, which demonstrate the subjective content without figuralities. The visitor's eye cannot take a rest on the details since something always happens through the game and motion of the surfaces.

The concept of creation and existence defines Kárpáti’s art considering both of his more abstract and more figurative works.
When looking at the paintings I am sure it was not the last time we met at Béla Kárpáti’s exhibition…

Zoltán Seprűs – historian of art