László Szotyory has put on an atmospheric and colourful exhibition which presents and interprets certain themes through a number of transferences - film, sculpture and architecture - at the Csikász Gallery in Veszprém. In the final analysis it is narrowly retrospective material, since forty canvases give an overview of his work from 1989 to 1998. Szotyory’s art unfolded at the beginning of the 1980s, in the years following his graduation from the College of Fine Arts. That period witnessed the spread of the new art in Hungary. Many artists, including a number of representatives of the second generation of the avantgarde, such as Imre Bak and István Nádler, and the young artists passing out from the College, such as József Bullás, István Mazzag, Zoltán Sebestyén and others, began to paint large-scale compositions in a free and sensitive style on the basis of Italian and German models. By contrast, László Szotyory was not affected by general trends; he was not intent on being up to date. He has been practising a colourful, evocative and fresh art all his own, an art so individual in Hungary today. With regard to Szotyory’s stylistic roots, it can be stated that his form of expression follows the impressionistic tradition in Hungarian art, although his painting is not built up on moods created by colour (as in plein air), but is more material, transferential and figurative, with a theme that is very much tied to the end of the millennium. If we want to look for parallels in universal art, the figurative painting of the American Eric Fischl, full of sexual innuendo, and the emblem-like painting of the German Martin Kippenberger, featuring people and objects, should be mentioned. The specialness of Szotyory’s painting is his choice of theme. One of the most characteristic of his themes is North America, the American movie, the American landscape, far-reaching highways and the huge cars which cruise along them. This enthusiasm is void of any bias; it is more dreamlike, with a hint of nostalgia; it comes from those times when inexpensive cinemas showed good films (good films and inexpensive cinemas have, of course, since disappeared). Szotyory, then, is not ironical, as is his contemporary the sculptor-ceramicist György Kungl; he is simply keen and depicts in his own evocative-sensual manner. This America is, however, not a directly experienced one, although the artist has been there, but the America of the above-mentioned movies, of his reading, of the landscape and the architecture. All this made authentic by Szotyory’s light, French style - a light, airy and yet accurate way of depiction last seen in Hungary in the paintings of Ödön Márffy. After looking at these general attributes let us list the themes we encounter at the exhibition in Veszprém. We can see charming and flirtatious women in baroque halls, Canova paraphrases, and we can peep into mysterious, often dark parks spotted with white sculptures, and we can take delight in Mediterranean landscapes. The businessmen in suits and ties, and the tough guys who appear in twos and threes on the canvas, are inspired by the above-mentioned movies.
I would point out two of his pictures among the many here. One is „Breakfast Outdoors”, which features two men in dark suits in the company of a half-naked woman in a mysterious, almost bucolic landscape. The first version of this painting was made in 1991, and its title deliberately refers to Edouard Manet’s famous painting bearing the same name. Szotyory is so fond of this theme that in 1993 he produced prints of it in several colour versions, and made a new version in paint again this year.The other work is his latest, which he finished just a few days before the opening of the exhibition, and which features Clint Eastwood on the canvas as a cowboy. László Szotyory is a sensitive colorist with good graphic skills, an intuitive artist who presents sensual and evocative themes. This attitude does not result from his themes of young, beautiful and sensual women: he approaches every theme of his in this way, be it a park with a Palladian villa, a Mediterranean landscape, or a big red or black limousine. The mood of his pictures is peculiar, puzzling and sometimes almost dreamlike, as evidenced by his canvas painting ”The Station”. "I paint what I would like to create around myself, an imaginary environment in which I live and feel good," he said once to me.
To the uninformed viewer it might seem that what Szotyory does is spectacle art. But his paintings are not spectacles, rather works shaped by imagination, since often he starts out from pictures, works of art created in some other branches of art, such as film or architecture, and his parks and sculptures are also the products of his imagination. Perhaps his skies alone are real, blue summer skies with white clouds.
In the final analysis, then, László Szotyory’s art and approach are postmodern: he reinterprets the interpretation of the world. He paints his virtual-intellectual journeys, whether in the USA, Italy or Budapest, and he shares these very evocative experiences with us in the Csikász Gallery, making us richer through a journey made to art.

 
Lajos Lóska