Gábor Lajta

Condensed Motion:
The Art of Tibor Csernus

 

I was on my third visit to Paris but I had never noticed before that the sky was different from what it was in Budapest.
I was hanging around in a marketplace, gazing at hares killed by hunters and at deep-sea fish, then looked up at the sky where the clouds chased each other in an odd way. In a sudden flash I was reminded of some of the mythological pictures of Tibor Csernus, with the sky as their background, where the ground had a heavy brownish-red colour but in the skies I saw the same wildly rushing, silvery oceanic clouds piling up. The conjunction appeared enticing: Hungarian earth with a French horizon. But no, things are not that simple after all. A painting is composed of innumerable, almost inexplicably interwoven artistic and life experiences. And indeed, do we really find, in the external world, at the spot where we landed by chance or by destiny, that internal image which is projected by the spiritual centre of our self? Do the "spirit of the place" and "our own spirit" really converge?
Tibor Csernus (b. 1927), a painter of international reputation born in Kondoros, a village in the southern Great Hungarian Plain, seems to have found that external spiritual centre in Paris, in a studio of the Bateau Lavoir, where Picasso and Braque once worked. But Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec also lived and painted within half a kilometre. Csernus must have received the decision assigning this particular studio to him, an accident controlled by destiny, with great happiness and satisfaction. And it must have been a great feeling to tread the pavements of the Rue Ravignon day after day in the wake of the great predecessors. Yet for Csernus, still haunted in his dreams by his one-time studio in Dráva Street near the Danube in Budapest, the real inspiration came not from romantic Montmartre but from the call coming from paintings, that is the movement of the arm of a Degas dancer or the steps of a Lautrec figure. For Csernus was always more inclined to enter into a dialogue with the roving spirits surrounding him than most of his contemporaries.
Csernus, who has lived in Paris since 1964, had his first one-man show in Hungary at the age of 61, in 1989, the last year of the "soft dictatorship". Before that, Csernus the exile had been a nonperson. He may have had a past but no present. While in Hungary, he was widely regarded as a major talent with a school of followers, yet he was rarely allowed to show. This despite the fact that he was a student of the influential Aurél Bernáth, one of the untouchables even for the Communists, who was respected much in the way as the composer Zoltán Kodály was.

After a while, though, Csernus left the protecting wings of the beloved and respected master. His early landscapes still show Bernáth's influence but his portraits, including Three Editors (Miklós Vajda, Mátyás Domokos and Pál Réz), shown at the National Exhibition of 1955, a scandal in the eyes of those responsible for cultural policy, or his portrait of the poet Ferenc Juhász already demonstrate a special gift for creating characters. His landscapes, reminiscent of Bernáth at first, also seemed to undergo a curious change, as if they had become melted by strange erosion. One witnessed the emergence of a completely unique, visionary type of painting somewhat in the vein of Max Ernst and the tachists. This was "suspicious" from the viewpoint of Hungarian "socialist realism", to say the least. The consequence was that while his followers grew in number, and his talent was recognised even by his enemies, he could barely earn a living, and his scope of movement became limited. A dictator-critic declared in writing that Csernus would never be allowed to have a one-man show in Hungary. Breaking out of the stifling atmosphere of his native country, Csernus chose to settle in the country where the central role of painting was practically unbroken from the Middle Ages through the Rococo, the Romantics and Classicism up to Degas, Cézanne and Van Gogh, and from them, up to our days. And Csernus, an innovator sensitive to tradition, threw himself into the stream of tradition. What would have happened if he had stayed home? The question makes little sense but the answer is still easy. Csernus would have most likely been too conservative for the upward striving neo-avangardists and neo-expressionists, and too post-modern and too "Western" to the "cultural politicians". Even the strongest bleed to death in the grip of scissors of this type.
Life in those days was not easy for him in Paris. Both his wife, a fellow artist, and he made their living for a long time by illustrating books, but they were at least able to illustrate the works of Zola, Sartre and Camus for the bibliophile editions produced by Gallimard. Csernus also produced a large number of Sci-Fi illustrations. The influence of this seemingly secondary activity has an almost unnoticeable presence in his later realist paintings, giving a mysterious, hyperbolic quality to figures. He gradually became able to make his appearance as painter again.
At first he continued with his "Magic Realist" manner, then bedazzled his audience, including highly respected art critics like Jean Clair, with paintings conceived in a relaxed hyper-realist style. Next, Claude Bernard, an influential gallery owner, entered the story - he had shown artists like Balthus, Bacon, Cremonini and Lopez-García - who had the good sense to offer him a contract. That was when the moment that the Hungarian painter, an artist with a surreally naturalist past, burst upon the international art scene. The timing was sound because, following the great "hunger for images" created by the neo-avant-garde, the rebirth of figural painting had been "hanging in the air" for a while. Csernus's hyperrealist paintings, which, in fact, had little to do with the painstakingly precise, mostly American photocopies of the times, showed increasingly marked contrasts of light and shade. This was probably the kind of pictorial effect that called up Caravaggio in his mind, as evidence of the Zen saw: "When the pupil is ready, the master makes his appearance".

Csernus's name and his extraordinary gifts became widely known and recognised mainly for his Caravaggio-like pictures. In 1985, a Caravaggio exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and, in a daring move, the New York Claude Bernard Gallery chose to show Tibor Csernus at the same time. Csernus held his own in the contest, while the stylistic differences were more than conspicuous. Viewers could admire his easy-flowing yet precise technique, the liquid vividness of his handling of oil, the subtly distanced cool of his Biblical subjects, and their near irony, a very twentieth-century feature. It was obvious even in the close presence of the great predecessor, that the cold and warm siennas and umbers Csernus was capable of, or his greens and reds, balanced with a meticulous care in the harmony of tones, would have stood their own even in the workshop of Caravaggio himself. The American painter, Jack Beal welcomed Csernus in an open letter as a wonderfully inventive painter who is second to no other contemporary painter in his handling of the paint from which the shapes and the vision arise. Beal also thought Csernus had much to teach to American realists, who were treating everything in the same dry manner.
A good deal later, in a weighty volume of ARTODAY, in an overview of contemporary artistic trends, Csernus's art was given prominent treatment by Edward Lucie-Smith as one of the most important representatives of postmodernism and Neoclassicism and a re-interpreter of the old masters. Lucie-Smith emphasised that, unlike Caravaggio, Csernus avoided narrative, yet at the same time the dramatic quality of light and shade lost none of their expressiveness.
Much could be said about Csernus's compositions, and about his attempt at the recreation of Baroque composition in general, with odd, sometimes barely noticeable modern hints and references mixed in: a curious hairdo, the contemporary way a hand is held, a modern look in the eyes - like strange, dissonant sounds occurring at random in some works by Neoclassical composers. One might also speak of the convoluted movements of the figures, which nevertheless cannot be mistaken for the heroic gestures of Tintoretto's characters.
Of the many virtues of Csernus's art, I would like to pick out just one. In the 20th century, the kind of tone painting which reached its last peak in Manet's paintings dried up. Csernus's velvety values, referring subtly to a Caravaggio as "overwritten" by Manet, are most likely the only inheritors of Manet's "experiment" in the 20th century. The majority of the geniuses of the 20th century, from Picasso to Bacon, did not take that path. Those who did, like Balthus, or among the contemporaries, Lucian Freud or Eric Fischl, important artists as they may be, never achieved the ease of expertise of a Van Dyck and a Rubens, which Csernus managed to get quite close to. True, falling under the spell of modernity, they probably did not regard it as important either. It is only now, at the start of a new century that, as if waking from sleep, professional competence is beginning to arise, carrying new expectations along with it. It is not mere chance that - although this may be known by few, perhaps not even by Csernus himself - evidence of Csernus's influence can be clearly discerned in the work of some members of the youngest generation of painters, for instance in Philadelphia (where, since the work of Thomas Eakins, vision painting has been a major trend). But in the meantime, while he is mostly known in the world for his work in the 1980s, Csernus has moved on, which is only natural. Art as such does not "develop", but individual painters, in their own way, may. Or at least they change. And Csernus has, for quite some time, wanted to achieve more than just fine pictures; he is broadening the range of what is regarded as representational art. He became more intense and more dynamic than before, and also more colourful. It is interesting that a growing colourfulness and light of the palette can be observed in the later stages in the work of many painters. Thinking of Hungarians, one might recall the later flowering of Rippl-Rónai, Egry or Czóbel. Csernus's themes have also been changing: for nearly ten years, he has been at work on an imposing series in the wake of William Hogarth's etchings, but in this particular time travel, Hogarth seems to have joined forces with Italian settecento masters, and it also appears that he is being supported in his work by the spatial inventions of Degas and Lautrec as well as the colours of Cézanne. But the time trip is led by Csernus; he is pulling the strings.
Surrounded by artistic forerunners as he is, Tibor Csernus is nevertheless moving increasingly farther away from evoking styles. His mind is engaged by new problems such as, for instance, the question as to what he sees in a given space in which his figures are moving, and how he sees it. And taking a real good look at something may be the same thing as seeing it for the first time. Where another painter can provide no help at all. For this reason he is now taking greater risks, but this kind of risk-taking is no longer equal to experimenting, like when he was testing his tools. It is more as if he were testing his own power. How far can he go without giving up the illusion of representation yet stretching he web of illusion to the utmost? In other words, he is not only looking at things but also allows a deeper reality to seep through the chinks in the paint marks. That is why Csernus's occasionally wild brush strokes in the manner of gesture painters, or his scratching off the paint like the tacheists, are never self-serving. In possession of a vast amount of experience, he uses the idiom of painting even more sharply and with greater precision than before. He goes over the same form twenty or thirty times when needed. He clears it away and paints it over. The calligraphic paint marks made with a flexible ox hair brush are perhaps even sharper and more precise than the more elaborate, better dispersed shapes used to be in his earlier pictures. Still, Csernus never was a painfully dry realist. Even his hyperrealistic pictures show a brilliant wit and sensuality. When taking a closer look, we can see the full calligraphy of brush strokes, deletions and scratches. Photographs and imitations of photographs disintegrate into meaningless particles or pixels when we move closer. But when we zoom in on the microcosm of Csernus's pictorial shape, it will turn into a macrocosm.

Csernus's recent paintings recall the "best" brush strokes of the abstract expressionists (Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, de Kooning), but he also stubbornly insists that the complete canvas shows a fully visible human space. Nor does he relinquish the rendering of materials and textures, which the above-mentioned painters were forced to leave out. And by doing so they also abandoned the atmosphere, just as the cubists following Cézanne suctioned off the air of the wet landscapes, hammering out a new kind of tin sky for themselves instead. In Cézanne's pictures - as well as in those by Csernus - the air is still there. When Csernus paints the Place Émile Godeau ("I felt I owed that square that much", he says), the sunshine still evokes the Impressionists. He looks far behind, as far as the Renaissance at times, but he lives his life in the present. The eroded surfaces, the splashes of paint, the gripping of elusive shapes as if caught in flight: these are his and his alone.
Talking about elusive shapes: indeed, Csernus is probably better at "catching" movements than anyone else. His pictures are condensed motion. Those of his contemporaries, like Eric Fischl, for instance, are snapshots rather than essences of motion. In what way does a woman press down her skirt billowing in a breeze? How does a person count the coins in his palm? Genre paintings? Well, maybe, but genre paintings were never so strongly pictorial in quality. Somehow the story always won, even with Hogarth. Csernus's genre paintings are at once negations of genre. Painting annihilates life because it is the only way that it can conserve it. That is why it will never be flattering.
In the early autumn of 2003 another major Csernus exhibition took place in Budapest, in the Blitz Gallery. The twelve pictures shown are, as if it were, complements to the Hogarth cycle exhibited at the Muýcsarnok in 1999, taken from the products of the last years. In them one may observe how the painter keeps circling around his favourite themes, how he picks out details from the picture in the making, as if he were studying scenes before shooting a movie. And he himself also appears in the paintings several times, just as if, embedded in the picture, he were discussing the next scene with the actors.
Entering the picture is not merely a symbolic gesture. Comparing the painter's earlier pictures with recent ones, it becomes conspicuous that those were more like windows in the sense of classical painting; that is, the actual scene was taking place behind the picture plane; nowadays it breaks through the picture plane toward the viewer with an increasing frequency, making it appear as if we could walk in and out through the picture. In one of the recent variants of the Hogarth series, currently exhibited (Camera, 2001), for example, the bigger-than-life figure of the film-maker in front stands before the picture plane, giving us the feeling as if we were rushing into the space of the picture along with him.
Tibor Csernus belongs to the eternally restless type of painters. His works always offer new spiritual thrills. And since in recent years his presence and influence have been increasingly felt in Hungary too, he is, after an absence of 40 years, once again regarded as a school-creating master in his homeland.

Gábor Lajta's
paintings have been shown in a number of one-man and collective shows. His writings on art and film have appeared in Új Művészet and Filmvilág.