Kóthay Ernő festőművész kiállítása (Kuny Domokos Múzeum, Tata, 1974)

Ernest Kóthay held his first exhibition in 1968, in his current exhibition he portrays a carefully and supremely colourful world. He conceals from us the difficulties of his artistic development. Ernest Kóthay paints birds, distant hills and revealing—glorious flowers, the glossy surface of water, thick—leaved trees, a pulsating root—structure, fairy faces gliding into tales with waving veils, and the metamorphoses of broken plants drowning in mysterious moors, and layers of earth crushing human bodies and forests suddenly bursting into flame and the desperate shriek of birds, and the paralysed, audible silence before the storm. . . . simple and now complex systems of symbols, for they take the form of human feelings, forms in human shape, symbolizing human behaviour; its symbols are forms of human actions in these carefully constructed dynamic scenic com­positions, because human modds are working away and boiling in the glowing trunks of trees, because human agonies are jerking in the twisty roots searching for existence. Still we are not overwhelmed by the waves of the images dissol­ving into a dream, into magic, its colourful sonnets open up without arousing tension. The main feature of his art is its sensitive expression. His joy and fears, his fighting and playing, his struggles and his phantazmagoria deriving from reality synthetized into reality, condenses into thoughts precepitated in his pictures. He is constantly looking for beauty, that”s why he always returns to nature with instictive and obstinate fanatism, and here he finds equilibrium and harmony in human relationships. On this level he familiarizes us with the laborious and tiring struggle of the disrupted balance of counterpoints, the sense of struggle, the sense of a foolish senseless fight. „Tree growing out of the rock" expresses the wish to live by planting the cruelty of the rock into fertile soil. The rest­less uneasiness of the luxoriously rich colours of „Water and shore" - its colours are not the heigtered reflexions of na­ture — are shot through with flashes of his joy of life. In the hoppelessness and sad loneliness of „The Bride" some hope still shriek through. After the passing away of „The Memory" new life springs out and even „The Death of the Fairy" is not the end but the beginning. The illusionary splashes of angry reds, sober blues and mysterious greens form a soft harmony accord in the pain­tings of Ernest Kóthay. The leading principle of his art is the conscious expression of senciour ambition to create and emotional and ideal purity. In his pictorial art he attracts his public by declaring his adhence, he makes them recognize human qualities. Wehner Tibor

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