Gabriella Kernács
Between Heaven and Earth
The Tapestries
of Zsuzsa Péreli
Ever since Babel, the great dream of
a universal idiom has been haunting our fragmented, multilingual world, intent,
with varying success, on recreating a paradise of mutual understanding. We
long for the mythical land of "one language and one speech", described
in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. Art, too, can be seen as attempts at such
re-creation, differing from age to age, and Zsuzsa Péreli's tapestries are
certainly encompassed by that world language of our dreams. Their idiom can
be understood best of all by the "men of goodwill" of the Christmas
carol, though they find ever less peace on earth.
Péreli is an unusual artist with a unique personality. What she represents
is becoming rarer in the world. I myself witnessed in October 2001 how visitors
to the Musée de la Tapisserie in Aubusson stood stock-still before her works - silent,
smiling, transfigured, as if they had entered an enchanted Watteau garden
where rare birds sang and players concealed in the shrubberies strummed soft
music.
The artist's appearance at Aubusson - whose workshops, which have existed since
the Middle Ages, have earned it the rank of capital of tapestry - was an honour
equivalent to a poet laureateship. She was following practitioners as eminent
as Watteau, Braque, Picasso, and the founder of modern French tapestry, Jean
Lurcat.
Opening her exhibition Entre Ciel et Terre at the Aubusson museum in October
2001, curator Michèle Giffault described as "fantastic" the way Zsuzsa Péreli
herself designs and weaves her works.
This was never the custom at Aubusson, where hangings would
be woven by the weavers from scaled tapestry designs supplied by the artists.
Zsuzsa, on the other hand, is a painter and tapestry weaver in one, which
is a phenomenon so unusual that I wanted at all costs to present her at Aubusson.
Zsuzsa Péreli is the first foreign artist ever invited here for a solo exhibition.
It is not by chance that we have given it the title "Between Heaven and
Earth". Thereabouts, I think, is where her works are to be found.
Zsuzsa Péreli lives in Tahitótfalu, a village on the Danube
not far from Budapest, as an ethereal, fairy figure in a delightful garden.
Hawk-moths flutter above her tulips and roses. She grows basil, sage, thyme,
rosemary and lemon balm, which she dries and ties in bunches. Animals tame
and wild obey her, and meanwhile she works at her loom from dawn until dusk
with an industry to equal that of any medieval weaver. As Péreli puts it,
I cannot imagine not being involved in every centimetre of my work. So I weave
my own tapestries and I don't usually make cartoons for them at all. The design
is usually in my mind instead, and I don't think I could tell anyone else
what colours were around or where they appeared in that picture. Nor would
I be ready to surrender the joy of weaving to someone else, above all because
of its spiritual character. It's like occupational therapy: whatever state
or mood I'm in when I sit down to weave, fifteen minutes later I'm focused
entirely on my work. I'm inside the picture as I weave it. If I'm weaving
a pillar, I'm a pillar; if a cloud, I'm a cloud; if a bird, I'm a bird. The
difficulty of weaving is another reason why I like it. It seems to me that
we're living in an age when works of art are created very quickly, on a sudden
whim, and often quite irresponsibly. Quality gets forgotten somewhere. I tie
myself to the loom to make sure I won't make concessions, and so I won't be
carried off in the stream. I think this medieval art form has to withstand
the pace and pushiness of the twenty-first century. All the effort, and the
mental state that that effort engenders, must, I feel, enter my works and
enter people's souls, just where I intend it. I can't imagine a work of art
without a soul. Most of my tap-estries take six months or a year to make.
During that time my life may be steam rollered or it may be blessed by the
passing of a white dove, but when I sit down to the loom, I feel neither.
And yet, it is a summary of my life, and my life is there in the weaving.
It is as if Zsuzsa Péreli were painting
old masters, although her tapestries are searingly contemporary and blend
the approaches of modern textile art. One of her early works shows a star
of the silent films, an eye-shadowed Asta Nielsen, nodding towards us, the
gathers at the waist of her dress sewn into the tapestry, black with white
spots, and with real, trembling guinea-fowl feathers (Asta Nielsen, 1978).
Often Zsuzsa Péreli draws a delicate Surrealism from the repertoire of modern
art. The double-sided tapestry Amnesia (1980) uses a wittily simple trick.
There are portraits of a man and a woman in nineteenth-century-style dress.
On one side, the woman is coupled with the reverse of the man's portrait,
the face concealed by the dangling tapestry strands. On the other side, the
man's portrait appears and the woman's vanishes into the tangle.
The Musicians Are Back (1982) conjures up the atmosphere of old photographs.
The village players have floppy hats, beards and moustaches. Where have the
bare-foot bass player and sad-eyed fiddlers come from, and where are they
bound? Around them one can almost hear the words of a Hungarian folk tune
("Off, I'm off on a long hard journey / Donning the dust of the long hard
road") and, at the same time, Chagall's remark: "The country I keep in my
mind's eye is mine alone. Its inhabitants stray in the air, seeking a home.
They dwell in my soul."
Péreli's Madonnas are curious figures. The Blessed Virgin, with its round-faced
peasant Madonna, is reminiscent of a votive picture from a village church,
sewn in gold. Around her hang other little tapestry pictures of hands, feet
and eyes in gold thread, representing the diseases suffered by hopeful supplicants.
One little picture hanging on the right by a red, white and green ribbon shows
a little gold-sewn map of Hungary. The year is 1987, three years before the
collapse of the East European dictatorships, just before the change of system,
and following a period of national sickness lasting several decades: a prayer
for recovery.
Christmas 1989 evokes the Romanian revolution. Real objects have been applied
to a tapestry background of gold and silver: the metal parts of an Orthodox
icon of the Blessed Virgin, with haloes and relief outlines of Virgin and
Child but black, empty voids where their faces should be. The accompanying
saints have no faces, either. Around them hang empty cartridges, old keys,
Romanian coins, and even part of a listening bug - a grotesque emblem of Ceausescu's
dictatorship, when bugs were ubiquitous in public buildings, schools, hotels
and the homes of perceived enemies of the regime.
Péreli often makes use of such objets trouvés. Above and below on Landscape,
End of the 20th Century (1990) swim pieces of refuse retrieved from the dump:
dented plastic containers, bits of tubing, scraps of paper, broken plastic
toys and cigarette packets. The ominous bands of refuse seem to press up against
the calm landscape of green hills and trees, and down on the blue sky with
its fluffy clouds.
Every picture of Péreli's contains calm: defending, protective, thoughtprovoking
calm in a strident world. Looking Out from the Credible (1993) depicts two
figures on a terrace paved with the kind of black and white tiles familiar
from the Dutch masters. They are leaning on a gold balustrade and gazing into
blue, moonlit infinity. In most of her tapestries there is a pure, spiritual
area that is yearned for. Anthem (1996), one of her most important works,
depicts blue arches and vaults, like a starry cathedral in the air. It is
one of eight works produced by different tapestry designers and inspired by
the Hungarian national anthem, but it might equally be a hymn to mankind.
It is encouraging us to look up to the sky from our homes, gardens, flocks
and earthly lives, to seek a road, a light before which we may bow our heads
and pray for someone, or something.
Angels form an important motif in Péreli's works. Below in Poor Angel (1997)
is a scene of devastation, apparently after an atomic explosion and reminiscent
of something out of Tarkovsky's film Stalker. We see an iron-grey ghost town
of prefabricated blocks and rows of empty windows. Above floats a bedraggled,
dispirited silvery-grey angel, his posture echoing the Crucifixion, or perhaps
that of a bat pinned to the door out of superstition. His attire is formed
from the coins of many countries, which cling to him like oil to the feathers
of a doomed seabird, weighing him down so that he can no longer soar in the
sky. Has he assumed all our sins? It was after seeing this work in the catalogue
of the Lódz triennial in 1998 that Michèle Giffault invited Péreli to Aubusson,
to take part in the exhibition 'Divinity in Tapestry' in 1999. The effect
created in this work is enhanced by the freely hanging vertical threads that
represent the sky, with only the town and the angel sewn onto them as tapestry
pictures.
The same spatial approach appears in her tapestry Æquilibrium (2000). In a
translucent space created from vertical gold threads hangs an airy moth-angel
between sky and earth, linking the hills below and an even band of clouds
above. As the artist explains,
Equilibrium is something everyone longs
for. If I want to raise something to the level of holiness I resort to the
traditional colour of gold, and I thought in this case the gold threads should
make the vertical lines leading upwards. I hadn't realised what a dreadful
task I was setting myself, because it is extremely difficult to sew gold thread.
I put myself through a great deal of suffering and several times it seemed
that the whole work would fall apart and I wouldn't be able to complete it.
In the end, the suffering produced in me a very strong spiritual harmony.
It really does seem as if things we haven't worked for have less value for
us. What I wanted was someone to link earthly and heavenly harmony, at least
in one picture. Who should that someone be? I thought of my first invitation
to Aubusson, when my tapestry Poor Angel forged a link between that town and
Tahitótfalu, where I live. So there should be an angel holding the balance
in his hand. But not a sad one. We've had enough of being sad in the last
millennium, especially we Hungarians. This angel was being created in honour
of the year 2000, so it had to be an angel in which there was equilibrium,
and he should know how to hold the strand that ties heaven and earth. I wanted
the earth to be a landscape on which the linking gold threads would shine
- a dawn landscape gilded with sunlight, with no hint of a human hand upon
it. This would be the earthly equivalent of the sky. I wanted the angel scarcely
to be corporeal, more like the wings of a dragonfly. Nor was his personality
to be too significant, since the important thing was the link. Just at that
time I was sent some wonderful silk thread by some Japanese friends of mine,
and I used it to sew the angel's garment. So, I was given some earthly assistance
to clothe the angel.
All Zsuzsa Péreli's works glint like the gold strand between landscape and
clouds in Æquilibrium, displaying a subtle, absurd humour, a quiet irony that
places even the most exalted topic in quotation marks. This is to be expected,
since Péreli is a passionate collector of strange jumble-sale objects: embroidered
hangings to protect the wall, porcelain teacups painted with angels, faded
brown photographs, old dance cards and anything else she finds amusing. Sentinella
(2000), which appears to be a self-portrait, shows pieces of old carpet in
various colours, on which sits a woman in a blue dress, her empty palms turned
inwards in a gesture that says, "I am unarmed". She sits like an old village
crone, guarding her bits of tradition - with a good measure of self-mockery,
of course. And what springs inevitably to mind is a passage from Psalm 37,
10 - 11: "Yet a little while, and the ungodly shall be clean gone; thou shalt
look after his place, and he shall be away. But the meekspirited shall possess
the earth; and shall be refreshed in the multitude of peace."
Gabriella Kernács
is an art historian on the staff of Hungarian Television. In 1998 she was
awarded the Hungarian Heritage Prize jointly with the director Tamás B. Farkas
"for a multitude of films that presented modern arts and crafts".
