iski Kocsis Tibor (Vác, 2000)

The beauty of art is that it would wish to embrace the totality of existence while working with a finite number of tools. In this regard, it is something akin to a complex parlour game, in which every step is possible and carries meaning, but these steps are only conceivable exclusively within the limits of the playing field and only in the given directions. This is the universe of restricted freedom. I would make mention here of two examples of this model: painting and photography. The former is traditional, as opposed to the latter, which is the first technical genre; never­theless, in making mention of each alongside the other, it is not without purpose if we consider the work of Tibor iski Kocsis. One of the most fascinating things to me about painting is that it is so "simple": all one needs for it is a brush, a primed canvas stretched over a wooden stretcher and the adequate quantity of oil paint. In spite of the fact that these requisites are so readily clear-cut, still the long revolution of the history of two-dimensional art has to all intents and purposes depended upon the interplay of these few components - and will continue to depend upon this. Photography, albeit related to a certain extent to painting with respect to its framing, nevertheless possesses a history of a fundamentally different character. Its principles and possibilities are determined by its technical background: to make a change beyond this is rather a matter of approach, as its source is always the same: reality itself. It has remained essentially the same, as it has the potential to record a scene or moment that exists in front of the camera lens - this is what is termed "mapping reality". Tibor iski Kocsis paints on the basis of photos. This is the basic pillar of his activity. The question often recurs: why should an artist who paints insist upon photographic likeness, the illusion of reality, when he works in the playful medium that might be considered one of the models of art? Thinking further, it would be worth finding the answer to what is the difference between "mapped reality" through photography and iski Kocsis's painterly choice of subject. One of the essential components of his work is his research of the possibilities of mapping. He has been occupied with the methods of the depiction of reality in the classic picture over the course of art history, and in the interest of precision he has employed various technical means for quite some time. Artists have long wished to enhance their painted images with sensory impact, i.e., the palpable rendering of psychic or spiritual symbols, whose guiding principle was magic, the desire for conjuring to life. Here we might analyse in detail the use of camera obscura in Renaissance painting, and like­wise the aspirations along similar lines of the Flemish and Dutch Masters - and down the line, the endeavours in visual principles of each era, all the way up to the end of the 19th century, at which point actual photographs served as a basis of comparison for the painted works. Along these lines, it is only Pop photo-realism that falls out, because here it was in the spirit of media criticism that methods were sought towards the repainting of the printed image. iski Kocsis, thus, has become a participant in a complex process, which can best be inter­preted as research. He seeks those technical solutions that produce an effect beyond "reflection ", which conjure the image as an experience for the eye, and which are not simply the repro­duction of a spectacle that could be substituted by photography. But in the case of the works presented in this catalogue, the why still remains unanswered. The spectacular finish­ing, composition and framing of his paintings, intentionally or not, remind us of a photo­graphic quality. If the end justifies the means, then we must search for the characteristic of the content that lies behind this solution - and namely that whose inevitable key is richness of detail. And to discover this, after all, we have to dwell a bit longer on the meanings of photography, but let us do this metaphorically with the emphasis on some of his works. For instance, his triptych depicting a family of deer (Family l-lll) follows a mode of portrayal which is explicitly bound to the photograph, in connection with depth of field. From this perspective, the animals' heads are not uniform, with those details that are further away blurry, while those close­­up are needle-sharp. The emphasis on this quality is rendered truly significant if we acknowledge this is a characteristic precisely of portrait photography. That is to say, that we can determine the position of the animals so far as we can recognise portraits in them that have been made in (photo-)studio conditions. Beyond its surrealism, we can understand that the expression of this situation serves to render the stag-portraits as the metaphor for human portraits. The more general association of this kind, or the determinant sense of perhaps already his entire oeuvre, is that it rescinds the fictional character of the content of his paintings, transforming their character so that the emphasis is on reality, on the reality of the world as experienced by the artist. This intention can be acknowledged considerably in Kocsis's subjects. He attaches these around an artist's sense of responsibility, as he feels it imperative to call attention to all­­embracing, global problems. These include the ecology, the crisis of industry and agriculture, the negative sociological effects of overproduction and the consumer world, which manifest themselves in the conflicts between migration, displacement and acceptance. The posing of these larger questions is a truly complicated task. The artist's strategy is to indicate symbolic details in his works, which refer to these problems: his mode of expressing their importance lies in the realistic, photographic approach. His pictures show details of reality - city, forest, earth, sky - but their framing is accentuated in such a way that the viewer cannot escape the question put to her/him, why the author has done this, iski Kocsis generally offers assistance: his titles serve to offer a measure of guidance in recognising his way of seeing things. His latest series is devoted to the issue of migration (Identity), which has brought a new element into his oeuvre inasmuch as here, as opposed to his earlier works, he has painted the portraits of refugee children without backgrounds, i.e., similarly to his deer, in an environment that evokes the studio. The pictures each highlight one figure, in a referential manner, conveying a general sense of uncertainty regarding their belonging. The depiction that is rich in detail and the concen­trated attention on the models in this case might be interpreted as an attempt to come closer to them, in which the artist presents the case of a behavioural pattern. The subject of the series is symbolic: the representation of skin colour can be interpreted as simply a question related to painting, or much rather from the side of the precariousness of existence deriving from the displacement of those living with a different cultural identity. In these pictures, iski Kocsis symbolises through the children this defenceless existence, which might be one of the basic experiences in this world of the new millennium. Painting, and art as a whole, carries responsibility. The system of its means can serve the purpose of pointing beyond the borders of culture. It can call to attention, can render the viewer receptive, sensitive to those determinant questions in the lives of us all, orienting our mentality, within its own narrow borders. This might be the purpose of art. The oeuvre of Tibor iski Kocsis might be an example of this. Zsolt Petrányi

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