Lossonczy Tamás festőművész (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem, Budapest, 2004)
Expression, Freedom Tamás Lossonczy is a passionate sort of man. And, with the many decades passing, he has become all the more passionate. Coming with age, wisdom has pushed this passion towards essences: he is passionately interested in man, in the various forms of human conduct, and he is passionately in love with art. His paper sculptures are much like his drawings: records of his moods and impulses. Their eruptive nature can be witnessed in the work process; the completed works manifest the gestures of folding, tearing and crumpling. Clearly, he is interested in no spatial and mass formation in the sense sculpture is, but in expression. If thus able to shorten the way to expression, he will not hesitate to grab a pencil, a pen or a brush, and associate graphic or pictorial means with plastic, three-dimensional solutions. His oeuvre is marked by periods of turning to sculpture, but what is at stake in these is not "experimentation in sculpture” or "excursion” in the area of another genre, but an instinctual quest for expression whether in the relief-like "string drawings” of 1946, the paper compositions made around 1968 or the wire statues of 1980. As a painter, Lossonczy has always employed the method or procedure he felt most adequate for communicating his message; in this respect he has never had inhibitions - in the course of his many years, he has gained the internal freedom this requires. His newer paper sculptures can be regarded as manifestations of this freedom. I once wrote of his statues (1989), and I then called the three-dimensional works of the master "fragile object poetry” and a surfacing of the "figurative tendency” lurking in his oeuvre. This latter figurative tendency, bearing certain narrative features too, has been reinforced since then, most conspicuously in his drawings. In this respect too, the new, figurative paper sculptures are related to the drawings, but the designation "fragile object poetry” no longer holds. Their fragility, ephemeralness, their being doomed to destruction, presents a sculptural existence similar to the earlier works, but instead of being poetic, they strike a note of coarseness, outspokenness, immediacy, caricature, humour or satire. No objets d'art, they are statues, pieces in a portrait gallery lining up before us. We see character and situations of life, and the opinion the maker has of his "models”. In spite of its fragmentary, transitory and improvisatory nature, Lossonczy’s series reminds me of the character heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the statues of Picasso and, more closely, the drawings of Oszkár Papp illustrating Theophrastos’ The Characters and the Ubu collages of Albert Kováts. It is perhaps this very fallible formation so little able to withstand time which contrasted with the untiring desire of expression concentrated in them that is most interesting and affecting in Tamás Lossonczy's paper statues. Let no one ever think of preserving them by transferring them into any "lasting material” for the artist has long been in the possession of the wisdom suggested by his deceased poet friend Sándor Weöres: "Pity rocks and clods: / Why are they everlasting/ when their only joy is in what is passing?” Gábor Andrási