Lost Eden (2000)
Ornamental objects were gradually replaced by small sculptures, as was traditional ceramic decoration by graphics and paintings silkscreened onto porcelain from art photos. No doubt a defining role in the formation of her work was played by the increasing abundance of workshops and devices at the Studio, and especially the creative atmosphere and the wealth of professional contacts which were made and strengthened in the weeks of working together. Still, it seems today that her work is a rounded whole, the extraordinary emotional character of her art being a defining force from the very beginning. Sensitive to the beauties of nature and Lost Eden One of my favorite woiks of art is a large, deep, wheeled ornamental ceramic dish, the banner of which is covered with thick foaming glaze, while the base is crowded with darkly twisting branches and, scattered abundantly among them, red dots of harvest. With this work Mária Geszler has given the gift of a captured moment of untouched nature. The precise date the work was made is also known: February 10, 1978. That year was an important date in modern Hungarian ceramic art, as it was at that time that the International Experimental Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét received its first fellowship artists - including Mária Geszler, who subsequently produced works regularly, almost every year, in Kecskemét, and as a member of the Art Council participated actively in the life of the Studio. Geszler's art underwent a substantial change in form and content in the late 70's and early 80's. She left the enclosed community of the Magyarszombatfa ceramic workshop, with folk art and the world of archaic cultures being pushed to the background in her art, the foreground being occupied by topical generic and artistic issues of the present, including the possibility of expanding the boundaries of the genre and achieving co-accessibility in the border area of grand art and applied arts. humanity, the artist wages a self-consuming internal struggle in order to be able to bear the inhumane phenomena of the new world. She attempts to combine the reality of the values dwelling within her with the realities of everyday life. One well-delineated direction in the defining of reality is hyperrealism, which in the 1970's was characterized in Hungarian painting by artists like László Méhes, Imre Kocsis and László Fehér, in sculpture by György Jovánovics, and in ceramic art by Imre Schrammel or specific periods in the art of Ildikó Polgár. A unique role in the age-old issue of the "concept of reality" was given to the photograph as a unique method of recording reality as it is seen. Particularly among graphicists, the technique became extremely wide-spread at the time in question, a major contribution coming from András Baranyai with the reorganization of the Makó Graphic Artists' Colony in 1977. Baranyai was one of those who, questioning the veracity of the photograph, transformed and modified photos, mainly portraits, self-portraits and still lifes, through graphic and photographic techniques in which as a result of the interventions the image lost its "veracity" and a significant part of its stored primary information. Mária Geszler uses photographs to record and reveal her own experiences of reality - whether seen, experienced, or dreamed. With her the photograph has retained its primary documentary role. She evokes intimate moments of family and private life, or memories of a trip, or visions which, deeply engraved in our awareness as defining experiences, recur again and again in a wide variety of forms and places. At the same time, events and reality are depicted in an extremely internalized manner, without emotional inhibiti-ons. Her earliest silkscreened works were earthware and, later, porcelain sculptures shaped like a curtain or window, in which the picture of an Eden-like romantic garden, forest, lake, or lonely bench could be seen. (In honor of Rousseau 1982, Lake - Curtained Window 1982, Iron-dust Landscape in Moonlight 1984, Spring Landscape 1984.) The picturesque images are silkscreened and fired onto a sheet which is then shaped into a window or curtain, resulting in works of outstanding lyricism of her family and herself. Geszler makes full use of ceramic art's wealth of painting devices in these portraits, which irresistably allude to the "true image," Veronika's kerchief (Childhood 1987. Self-portrait 1987) These works are also the first on which - in place of images of untouched nature - abandoned industrial plants and destructive factories appear. The sheets of the Poetry of Industrial Landscapes 1988 series evoke a sense of horrified awe, the sadness of passage, destruction, irreversible time. Although the scale and relationship is different, these factories and mines convey the information accumulated over the period of their use, their everyday histories, in exactly the same way as Van Gogh's worn-out boots. History, the shared recent past, ties us to them, in spite of the fact that they are not connected to us personally or to a specific individual. These works by Geszler define the unique perspective of the artist and viewer by presenting the picture, the image, through a window or curtain. The contrast of internal and external space, inside and outside, the distant and the near, form tension in these works. At the end of the Eighties Geszler created her half-puppets, whose enclosed, neutral basic shapes and interconnected surfaces were outstandingly suited to both painting and sculptive creation. Their application at the same time brought a radical change in the relationship of image and form, and image and viewer.