Mozgás '70-'90 (Pécsi Galéria, 1990)

Gyula Pauer's sphere of activities embraces numerous fields of the fine arts as well as the art of the theatre and cinematog­raphy. He can be regarded as one of the chief representatives of the Hungarian Conceptual art and as the inventor of Pseudo­art. He has concerned himself with spectacle virtually for over 20 years: the spectacle of the things of the external world, their outward appearance, the way in which the recipient senses them and also in what way these visions can be projected — represented in a wider sense. Pauer, who declares himself a sculptor above all, first came across the problem of the representation of spectacle in the field of sculpture. The altering spectacle of his small sculptures made in the second half of the sixties depending on the point of view and illumi­nation induced him to reduce the information value of the 3rd dimension of reality to the minimum in his art and to represent the non-real, illusionary ’’painterly” 3rd dimension on the surface of his sculptures. Thereby Pauer created the so-called Pseudo-sculpture in 1970, in the manifesto of which he expli­cated theoretically that Pseudo was real and non-real, false and true at the same time. By providing a great number of dichoto­mies related to these concepts and phenomena he responds to the situation of the art of sculpture itself and raises an old but always timely philosophical problem, the issue of the cog­nizability of the world in the idiom of the fine arts. On account of its ideological bearings Pseudo-sculpture, which presents the experience of sensorial delusion with an overwhelming force, could be extended to any field of life. Pauer recorded the light and shadow relations of the sur­faces of objects and things by means of the Pseudo-procedure, which is analogous with the photographical procedure but ma­kes use of a dye-sprayer and veils, only to put back the pictures of the ’’things” recorded in this way onto the things themselves, thereby questioning their self-identity. In the field of fine arts the pseudo-problem has led Pauer to Conceptual art, which regards the realization of a concept or an idea unnecessary, and in parallel with this he adopted the pseudo-technique in de­signing stage scenery of pseudo nature from the outset. Since 1978 he has mainly adopted the principle of Pseudo in connection with the human body: the sculpture of Maya\ the pathosformels made by Pauer's own body; the body of Christ on the veil of Turin; impressions of the bodies of the partici­pants of the beauty queen contest of 1985 and of the French ballet-dancers; in Seuol the figure floating round his own head in a wheel-chair after falling from the sky and finally the fictitious painter, Puci Péry, are the most important stages of his art. ANNAMÁRIA SZŐKE

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