Frigyes Kőnig Retroaktív (Budapest, 2000)
The Secret Alchemy of Things About the art of Frigyes König There is a photograph: two pseudo-antique heroes wrapping their togas around themselves. For the sake of credibility, they are doing this in front of a tympanum, adding a third portrait to the composition, a Roman copy. They sit barefoot as if to show us that time means nothing to them, their gestures at once a living rejection of time. Frigyes König and András Lengyel thus stumbled upon a point on the coordinate axis and freely settled within a chosen historical age. Despite its amusing undertone, there is a definite seriousness to this role-playing game, which should be understood as a hint of the limitless nature of art. It suggests that art is not a series of completed phases with no relationship to each another, but a system of connections to be interpreted independently from the laws of time. Therefore, continuing an interrupted visual dialogue a century later or strengthening its connection with the physical reality of our presence does not signify a desecration of the given historical age. Such openly declared artistic freedom is extremely rare in contemporary Flungarian fine art, all the more so because the spectacle is twofold: it determines the situation of both the artist and the art itself. Naturally, the eclecticism of form (as the freedom to select different elements) is always a repeated phenomenon, especially in post-modernist art, but the almost humanistic character of the artist's own self-determination and his attitude towards art are not. König takes his art seriously, which is probably the source of his enduring thirst for knowledge. The "scientific collection" he has created with his work up to now relates to periods of painting in which objective discovery based on personal experience was a decisive factor. Hannes Böhringer proclaimed the following in connection with the empirically inclined artists of the 19,h and 20,h century (Cezanne, Seurat, Kandinsky): "As in the time of the Renaissance, modern art also has a need for an epistemology similar to that of science. Modern art is research, a variable series of controlled experiments."' In terms of his own artistic disposition, König exhibits much stronger ties to the epistemology of past ages - Renaissance, 19th century, Modernism - than to his own age. One reason for this is the aforementioned desire to make discoveries through scientific observation, but also because his own age does not necessarily consider the free selection of artistic alternatives to be natural, and has difficulty accepting things that are impossible to categorize. König belongs to the genera- 1 1 Hannes Böhringer, Egyszerűvé válni [Becoming Simple](Balkon, 1995) vol. 10-11. p. 5