Images of Faces and Hands

The images of faces and hands were created in the 2000s, during the Szolnok period of the artist from Senta. This recent body of work bears eloquent witness to the fact that, in distilling and communicating his painterly concerns, György Verebes has come to focus almost exclusively on the representation of faces and hands. These images may be understood as closely interconnected series, yet this does not preclude individual paintings, when removed from the ensemble, from standing before us as complete and autonomous works in their own right. Beyond their shared themes and motifs, their serial character is reinforced by format and technique. The images of faces and hands are oil paintings on canvas, executed in regular upright or horizontal rectangular and square formats, in the spirit and practice of classical methods of painting.

A further point of departure for interpreting these works—one that leads us onto somewhat less certain ground—may be offered by a supposition disguised as a statement: judging by their means, we might initially regard these images of faces and hands as representational and expressive works, even as conventionally figurative paintings of a realist orientation. The painter records on his canvases human figures, or fragments of the human body, that are real or appear to be real. Essential to both representation and expression are colour and its subtle, sensitive modulations. Yet if we look more closely at this supposedly precise mode of representation, at these fragments of the human body fixed in oil on canvas—and what else can the viewer do with a painter’s work but look at it closely?—if, as a first stage of reception and interpretation, we meticulously examine the elusive spaces dissolving into ambiguity, the mysterious faces with their eyes closed, the strange configurations of the hands, then we are compelled to reconsider, and ultimately revise, the classification of these works as realist—a term that has acquired a somewhat suspect resonance since the second half of the twentieth century.

Throughout the long centuries of art history, faces and hands have occupied privileged positions in the works of artists of different periods. Yet both face and hand appeared primarily as elements of the complete human figure charged with essential meaning; the face, moreover, became the central motif of portraiture, itself elevated to the status of an autonomous genre and frequently presupposing the half-length or full-length figure. In other words, face and hand belonged to a well-established system—to use a conventional expression—that of the human body, the human figure. Then, in the twentieth century, the hand too emerged independently, severed from the body and elevated into a concentrated work in its own right.

It is therefore among faces and hands charged with symbolic meaning—faces and hands that condense the spirit of their age into metaphor—that we must search, far beyond the homogeneous realm of faithful representation, as we attempt to probe the fields of meaning in György Verebes’s images of faces and hands. Yet this inquiry is disrupted by further discoveries: the faces are not human faces at all, but portraits of Titans; the hands are not simply hands, but mudras—representations of ancient Far Eastern hand positions associated with the practice of yoga.

Thus, through the compositions of György Verebes, the closed-eyed Titans and Titanesses of Greek mythology—the second generation of the gods, born as the children of Gaia and Uranus, caught up in struggles for power and themselves struck down by power—would gaze out at us from these works, if only they opened their eyes. The first question that arises, then, is why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the artist paints these mythological figures of ancient Greece and their imagined portraits: beings of turbulent destiny, at one moment cast into the depths, at another mutilated, devoured or released from the underworld, and ultimately personifications of strength and, through their inventions, benefactors of humankind. Clearly, it is precisely their turbulent fate, their frenzied struggles, their battles for power, their hopeless defeats and radiant victories that enable the formulation and articulation of symbolic meanings, of messages addressed to our own time. Yet this is only the first level on which these images of faces may be approached.

As in the compositions of faces, so too in the mudras the Szolnok painter evokes motifs drawn from phenomena remote in both time and space: the ritual gestures and positions of the hands found in Hinduism and Buddhism, of which there are more than a hundred variations in Tantric rites. According to a lexical definition:

Obstructions may arise for psychological or physical reasons in the channels through which life flows within living beings. These channels terminate in gateways at the fingers, palms, feet, crown of the head and perineum. Through these gateways, each individual is connected to the infinite energies of the Cosmos. With the aid of mudras, we may heal ourselves and gain strength or wisdom.

Moving beyond the symbolic realm, however, and experiencing the field of effects generated by these images of hands as well as by the images of faces, we may arrive at the psychic forces transmitted by the works: at the realm of meditation and at the impulse to turn towards our inner selves. We move through intangible, unbounded spaces; we are confronted by faces we have never seen and never known—awkwardly searching for eye contact with eyes that remain closed—and we study strange positions and movements of the hands in which none of the gestures familiar to us can be found.

We may become spellbound by deep hues turning towards darkness, by strange lights that break through their depths; and thus, within these extraordinary painterly realms—realms steeped in sensuousness and bringing these unfamiliar motifs to life—we may be touched by the metaphysical, transcendent radiance of Being.

Elusively luminous, wrestling with uncertainty, captivating us with their strange and mysterious beauty, tenaciously embedding themselves in memory: such are the works of György Verebes. Reduced to a single motif yet interpreted with rich and sensitive painterliness, confronting us with the faces of Titans and the hands of mudras, they reflect upon our own age through multiple layers of mediation.

It is presumably in this way that these works, striving towards totality and addressing us with profound intimacy, fulfil their vocation and their mission.

Delivered at St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest on 17 September 2018, at the finissage of an exhibition by the painter György Verebes.