In Praise of the Painter of Breath

Painting reduced to essentials: from a handful of subjects, an entire vision of the world emerges in the artist’s latest exhibition.

It takes extraordinary courage to step outside the mainstream of contemporary painting and offer the public something altogether different, something that seems almost to come from another world. This was what struck me first at the current exhibition of György Verebes (56).

In the title of this essay I call him a “painter of breath”, and that is indeed how I see him. His glazes seem barely to touch the canvas, leaving only the faintest trace—yet there is something quietly defiant in that trace, something that runs against the prevailing current.

Only hands and heads are visible in the exhibition rooms. What they share, on the one hand, is their closeness to human experience—a departure from the fashionable gestures of the present—and, on the other, a respect for the canvas, if I may put it somewhat grandly. There is also a quiet acknowledgement of the traditions of the Szolnok School, with its origins in a quasi-naturalistic vision of the world. This is the tradition from which Verebes proceeds and to which he remains connected, even as his art ultimately stands beyond schools and movements.

As I have said, the painter does not follow in the footsteps of mainstream painting. For me, this means that I have rarely encountered painting so autonomous—almost defiantly so—so ready to challenge the spirit of the age while remaining, at the same time, so close to the human.

Hands dominate many of the works in the exhibition. Much of what we see consists of variations on clasped hands and faces, yet across the three rooms of the Társalgó Gallery these hands and faces coalesce into an entire vision of the world. A hand that caresses; a hand folded in prayer; a hand that rejects. A face that reveals itself, or hides from the world in order to say something about it. Sometimes it prays—although one particular painting is not really a symbol of supplication at all, but rather a solemn composition of strangely intertwined fingers, palms and hands.

Verebes brings all this to the canvas with a transparency that seems almost to approach the threshold of visibility. You have to pay very close attention to what he is doing. The painting addresses you, but then waits for your response; and if you are attentive, you begin to discover many secrets within these apparently simple compositions of hands.

Let me give an example. In one configuration of clasped hands, an almost imperceptible flash of white suddenly appears before you, a patch that seems almost not to belong there. Yet if you look closely, that tiny flash comes to command the entire painting.

For a moment, the painter of breath seems to step outside his own manner—though in fact he does nothing of the kind—and suddenly tells you: pay attention for a moment.

Of course, you perceive this command only if you linger before the painting. And this, again, is something utterly distinctive about Verebes. We tend simply to walk past the fashionable paintings of today—with honourable exceptions—occasionally stopping, wondering, perhaps becoming irritated. But to linger before a painting, truly to spend time with it: this habit among exhibition-goers is itself falling out of fashion.

Verebes, by contrast, confidently embraces this older culture of attentive looking. It is almost as though he takes pleasure in seeing the visitor stop before one of his works and find himself held there by what he sees.

Of course, that sentence is only a metaphor. But this is what I took away from the paintings gathered in these rooms: Verebes’s works compel the viewer into dialogue, even though their subjects are hardly diverse—heads, hands, arms, fingers and so on, as I have already mentioned.

Yet this apparent narrowness of subject is deceptive. One might just as well say that the history of the world can be told in only a few words.

And, of course, I should add that every painter would like viewers occasionally to become absorbed in their paintings, to linger before them. The trouble is that nowadays this very rarely happens. In our hurried world, “lingering” is hardly considered proper behaviour—if I may scribble a small impertinence into the margin here...

Three rooms filled with large-format paintings, and you find yourself having to walk through them again and again. Naturally, there are works you pass over. But there are others before which you stop in wonder, sensing traces of the discipline of the old masters.

What this means will differ from person to person. For me, it is a source of pleasure. The avant-garde once bade what seemed to be a final farewell to the classical tradition; now, beneath Verebes’s brush, that tradition returns—disguised, concealed, as a secret.

Those secrets are worth seeking out.

The reward is there.