On Bodies and Souls

Thus man is citizen of three worlds. Through his body he belongs to the world which he also perceives through his body; through his soul he builds up his own world; and through his spirit a world reveals itself to him that is exalted above both the others.

— Rudolf Steiner

György Verebes’s painterly exploration of body and soul, presented in the exhibition spaces of Széphárom, is meditative in character, while also revealing much about painterly technique and craft. For years, Verebes has focused—primarily in large-scale oil paintings—on the human face, particularly faces with closed eyes, and on hands, especially hands poised for prayer or connection. These fragments of faces—not portraits, but faces—and hands move with extraordinary elegance, in an almost monochromatic palette, along the boundary between study and analysis. He calls many works in the latter series Mudras.

Mudras are symbolic hand gestures associated with particular meanings and energies in Asian spiritual traditions. They aid meditative concentration, while some traditions also attribute healing functions to them. In Verebes’s interpretation, the faces are images of sleeping Titans who discover the deepest reaches of their souls by turning inward. Behind their closed eyes, the archaic Greek world seems to emerge: the world in which the Titans rose against the gods of Olympus.

Over the past year, Verebes has added a new figurative cycle to these two bodies of work—the Mudras and the Titans—one that points towards the unity of body, soul and spirit. He calls this series Soma Sema. The soul is of a higher order than the body and holds dominion over it; at the same time, however, the body is a prison for the soul. Plato evokes this relationship through the well-known wordplay sōma–sēma: body and tomb.

In this series, Verebes’s figures—mostly androgynous—assume unusual poses. They seem about to enter into a dance, some form of magical sequence of movements. Some figures are already stretching upwards with an arm raised; others crouch, exhausted, or wait in a state of ecstasy.

These solitary figures might also be seen in relation to the solitary heads and hands: their character and the manner in which they are painted are remarkably similar.

Verebes’s oil paintings are richly nuanced works, rendered with a subtle, atmospheric softness. The near-monochrome palette of the figures ranges through earth colours—brownish greens, golden ochres and yellowish whites—while the earlier Mudras and Titan faces are warmer, characterised by pinks, greys and browns. The overall effect is dreamlike.

Verebes’s figures—or rather, apparitions—balance on the threshold between being and non-being, the tangible and the unreal. His painting reaches back, on the one hand, to the pictorial language of late nineteenth-century academic painting—one might think, for example, of the two figures in János Vaszary’s early painting Golden Age—and, on the other, to the monumental nudes of Jenny Saville, a prominent British figurative painter whose work is closely connected to the legacy of the School of London and whose paintings explore the female body. Saville’s painterly language has much in common with Verebes’s work—in her use of colour, monumental scale and isolated figures on the canvas—although the British painter is more direct and more ironic.

The fragments of hands and faces that Verebes painted in earlier works might likewise invite comparison with László Lakner’s Pop Art-inflected, photo-based realist paintings of isolated details. Yet Verebes presents these fragments in a far more painterly manner, without relying on a photographic approach: his point of departure is not documentary but meditative.

György Verebes’s profound and lucid painterliness leads the viewer into a world in which one may experience not only beauty and virtuosity, but also the visual pleasure of something that offers nourishment to the soul and spirit.

István Sinkó