Pillars of the Body, Boundaries of Being

“The Dance of Existence of Every Created Being”*

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Duncan MacDougall, a physician in a small American town, conducted experiments in an attempt to measure the weight of the soul and thereby prove its existence. According to his theory, at the moment of death the human body loses approximately twenty-one grams of its weight: the soul, in other words, weighs precisely twenty-one grams. To test his hypothesis, he constructed a special scale and, in 1907, spent months in a nursing home weighing the dying immediately before and after death. The scientific validity of the experiment has, of course, long since been discredited many times over, yet the idea that the soul might possess a material extension of its own has inspired many, among them the Mexican magical-realist filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose haunting film 21 Grams travelled the world as part of a trilogy concerned with death.

It was no accident that this parallel came to mind in connection with György Verebes’s Soma Sema series (2024), whose paintings show naked bodies, stretching torsos, figures crouching or just rising from the ground. Their faces are either unseen or only loosely defined, while an aura-like light surrounding the bodies heightens their ethereal, visionary quality. It is as though the artist were attempting to capture that transcendent moment when the soul “casts off the body” and the body moves one final time. This movement is at once arrested and dissolved in the softness and muted quality of bluish greens, greys and browns applied in vigorous brushstrokes. The palette is almost monochrome. These are the colours of earth, but also of decay: mould, decomposition, the passing away of matter are all evoked, and together with the light falling upon the figure they create a sublime, almost otherworldly sensation. The sacred departs from the profane—from the confinement of body and time—and for a moment dances upon the boundary between Being and non-being.

For Verebes, it is essential that the world of colour he has discovered and come to inhabit should possess a temperature, even a scent; his paintings elicit synaesthetic sensations. “Scent always comes into being where there is evaporation. And evaporation occurs where two different temperatures meet. Scent is a release,” he observed in an earlier conversation.¹

Verebes graduated in 1989 with a degree in graphic art. He came to the Academy through an interstate student exchange programme after completing his military service in Zagreb. He chose Budapest because, as a Hungarian from Vojvodina, he would have had little chance of entering higher education in the fine arts in what was then Yugoslavia. He was permitted to sit the entrance examination to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts under a special procedure; had József Somogyi not considered him sufficiently talented, he would almost certainly have pursued a career in the natural sciences, for he already had a place waiting for him in petrochemistry in Novi Sad. With physicians among his forebears and a qualification as a chemical technician, nothing could have been more natural. His analytical cast of mind and his need to understand things systematically surely have some of their roots here.

When a muscle is unable to relax, it shortens and becomes painful; its normal tone and the sensation of complete relaxation are lost. Somatics, also known as muscle control, seeks to release this involuntary muscular tension produced by stress. Might it be this same involuntary tension that we observe in the torsos of the Soma Sema series? Is what I have interpreted here as the body’s final, tense movement involuntary—or, on the contrary, an act of will?

According to Plato, during earthly existence the human soul is imprisoned within the body; yet because it is of a higher order than the body, it exercises dominion over it. The soul was only temporarily torn away from the realm of Forms when it entered the body. Soma, the body, is the tomb of the soul: its sema. True knowledge is possible only for the soul, since it belongs to the realm of Forms, retains a memory of them and cannot perish, because it is “one”. As Plato writes in the Phaedo: “Then when death attacks a man, the mortal portion of him may be supposed to die, but the immortal retires at the approach of death and is preserved safe and sound.”²

György Verebes’s metaphysical painting is grounded in his philosophical interests. He believes that art is capable of ennobling material existence, of transforming it into spirit. “The [Soma Sema] paintings speak of the dance performed by soul and spirit, concealed within the body, in a world which, ultimately, they themselves create out of themselves, through their own will. This dance is the dance of existence of every created being—the artist’s, the viewer’s, all of ours,” he writes in the text accompanying the exhibition of the series.³

If, then, we pursue the preceding line of thought in an attempt to decipher the philosophy of Verebes’s Soma Sema, we may suppose that in the final instant before its separation from the body and its return to the realm of Forms, the soul that has fulfilled its earthly mission assumes command of the body—or at least this is what may be read in the concentrated movements of the figures straining within these paintings.

Verebes explores the depths of human existence. “I felt that if I could somehow touch the beginning, I would also be able to catch the end in the act,” he said in an earlier interview.⁴ Experiencing one’s own body is an essential part of this inquiry. He himself paints in a kind of meditative trance: a genuine dance, a nocturnal ritual in which the experience of physical existence opens a path towards the spiritual, within a kind of timelessness. In this state, the person of the painter becomes irrelevant. The figure unfolds of its own accord upon the canvas, and when he “recognises” it, the work is complete—it has “become true”—even if it may appear unfinished. The recognition of the formation is the crucial moment. The place itself—the studio—becomes a sacred space, and oil paint naturally becomes the medium through which this atmospheric effect is brought into being.

In most ancient creation myths, the first human being is a creature of God fashioned from clay or mud who, once given physical extension, receives a soul that brings the body to life, while the longing to return to the primordial state remains one of the fundamental experiences of existence. Through the almost kneaded, breathed-into density of Verebes’s torsos, and at the same time through their airiness, this existential weight imposed upon the human being becomes visible.

The lines of the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden, which became the motto of R. B. Kitaj’s landmark 1976 exhibition The Human Clay, read:

“To me Art’s subject is the human clay, And landscape but a background to a torso...”⁵

The celebrated London exhibition, curated by R. B. Kitaj, was entitled The Human Clay. In the paintings of Soma Sema—among them Voluntary Sacrifice, Necessity, Nevertheless and The Earth Is My Witness—these clay-like, modelled mortal forms evoke archetypal experiences of Being: the suffering caused by our creation into physical existence, the unceasing struggle arising from it, but also humility and repentance. At the same time, this transient “human flesh” gives complex expression to time itself: the alternation of muted tones signifies transience, while the light sweeping across the body signifies eternity, and the two perpetually turn into one another.

“Who Is It That Sees Through My Eyes?”

I began this study deliberately with György Verebes’s most recent series. I did so because the holistic system of thought within which the artist works is not necessarily best approached through chronology. Soma Sema—following the title of the exhibition—seems to complement and complete the two other cycles centred on the body: Sleeping Titans (1999–) and Mudra (2004–). In the former he examines faces; in the latter, hands, most often pairs of hands. A third subject now joins these two, inserting, in its own time, the missing torso between head and hands. Thus the three series form a whole—not, as the artist himself insists, as the result of a preconceived concept, but rather intuitively. These bodily pillars fill the absence left by the hands and faces. Yet their absence carried just as much significance as their presence does now. The series evolves organically.

The question arises as to what extent the Titans, the mudras and the torsos of Soma Sema are portraits, portraits of hands, or full-figure compositions, and to what extent, beyond the concerns of painterly composition, they may be understood as imprints of the human experience of being invisible to ourselves. For when, for example, we look at our own hand or our reflection in a mirror as an isolated body part or as a portrait, what we see is not ourselves.

According to Jean-Luc Nancy, the portrait brings us into relation not only with the other—with the infinite—but also with ourselves as other, with ourselves as infinite. In Nancy’s interpretation, the portrait is the “plane of fracture of an encounter already absent”, in which the subject may confront his own “invisible face” and “enter into relation with the absence of his own face”.⁶ Verebes’s synthesising, systematising and analytical painting is surely connected to his persistent need to investigate the self.

The painterly means employed across these three series—which are, in truth, one—are partly unified. In his large-scale oils on canvas, Verebes employs a subtle painterliness and a meditative mode of figuration. Yet the ritual representations of the body in Soma Sema are somewhat more mediated, more loosely defined and more subtle. The decline of physical capacity is also present in the struggling movements depicted here. The young body is a source of joy, the mature body a source of strength, and the ageing body a source of suffering. The torsos—the bodies stripped of sexual characteristics—also speak of possessing one’s presence within the body, or of the inability to possess it.

By contrast, the earlier works, particularly the Titans, are characterised by a certain distancing and archaising quality, reminiscent of the impassive, rigid smile of early Greek sculpture, or even the smile of the Buddha. Their emotional equilibrium is never disturbed. The “awareness” behind the depicted faces controls its own condition and that of its surroundings; it occupies a position of mastery over both. It is a postulate of what may be the human being’s one essential task: to attain mastery with regard to one’s own identity, and to become capable of relinquishing certain elements of it—the body, for instance—without truly suffering the loss, doing so without injury and with a clear consciousness. Both the Titans and the mudras—the latter in a somewhat more abstract manner—are directed towards this end.

“Who is it that speaks from within me? Who is it that sees through my eyes?” These ontological questions animate Verebes, and it is their projections that appear in his paintings. He was deeply influenced by the British writer Douglas E. Harding’s On Having No Head, in which, drawing on Zen Buddhism and other traditions, Harding describes the “headless way”. Anattā, or the absence of a self—the insight that there is no permanent, individual self—is not merely a key to understanding Buddhism; properly understood, it is a key to life itself. “It is true of the work of every rational creature: the more they go out of themselves, the more they enter into themselves,” says Meister Eckhart.⁷

“I Wanted to Understand Their Reality”

The classical means employed by Verebes may be traced as far back as Netherlandish painting. We might think, for example, of The Fall of the Titans by the seventeenth-century Flemish master Jacob Jordaens: its movements and use of colour display a visible affinity with Sleeping Titans, although Verebes’s Titans do not fight one another; they wage their struggle within themselves.

Verebes openly acknowledges his reverence for his predecessors. The perpetual questioning of tradition has no place in his outlook or his philosophy of life. He believes in the cyclical nature of time. He is no longer drawn towards abstraction or symbols; rather, he is driven by the impulse to create a new definition of space.

His attraction to antiquity manifested itself early. He began as a graphic artist and only later turned to painting, developing his own visual language thereafter. Part of this process of learning was the landscape Antique (2002), in which a blurred colonnade is suggested through a misty light. Yet he also regards the earlier Tiepolo’s Studio (1997) as important, for it marked a turning point after his monotypes and semi-abstract experiments. Here we already encounter a sense of vastness, as well as his inexhaustible fascination with mountains: a surreal, fragmented and yet expansive space.

The first Titan, indeed, literally “emerged” from a landscape. In 1998, at the artists’ residence in Kecskemét, Verebes agreed to repaint an unfinished landscape by a colleague when he suddenly saw a face within it. He transferred that face to a blank canvas. The series began there.

The mythological Titans, the children of Gaia and Uranus, embody primordial force and struggle. My assumption is that Verebes’s Titans are not asleep at all, but are turned inward, contemplating. Verebes himself describes these figures as “landscapes of the soul”. They have no gaze, and therefore no personality. Morphologically, they are faces; in reality, they are physical imprints of states of consciousness.

Yet these portraits—or, more precisely, these “non-personalities”—do differ from one another according to a single characteristic: age. The Awaited One (2008) shows a child with the face of an angel, while titles such as Adolescent (2007), The Old One Remembering (2008) and The End of the Golden Age (2002) likewise refer to stages of life. Here we may once again invoke Nancy’s theory, which understands the portrait as the imprint of the infinite stretched across the countenance of a “finite”, mortal person. Seen in this context, Verebes’s faces, bearing the marks of different ages, acquire their meaning collectively. Nancy identifies the radiant, divine light surrounding the faces with the infinite.

Verebes is also interested in people driven to the margins, those living outside the social order; indeed, by his own account, they attract one another like magnets. This is surely no coincidence. Writing of homo sacer, Agamben observes that in archaic thought the point at which the outcast, the person excluded from society, the “impure” and the sacred intersect is the taboo, the “sacred horror”—in Freud’s terms, the “sacred and accursed”.⁸ Being chosen and being traumatised often go hand in hand; it is a mysterious territory. Behind the closed gaze of the Titans, these personalities inhabiting altered states of consciousness are also concealed—not as individuals, but as a kind of “primordial force”.

Verebes’s painting may therefore be situated within the millennia-old tradition of figurative art. Yet for precisely the reasons outlined above, the figure itself does not occupy the centre of his work, since the subject of these paintings is not the person, personality or identity. Judging by his series, the subject of Verebes’s painting is the consciousness of the body—or, more precisely, the inner experience of bodily consciousness—and, in a broader sense, the apprehension of a state of Being.

His paintings contain no narrative elements, yet neither are they studies of the body or nudes; the figures possess no identifiable attributes. Through the language of the visual—and, indeed, by making it visceral and directly experienceable—they give form to a state of Being that is difficult even to articulate in words: how can a human being bring the layers of identity, the body, the soul and the spirit under his own command?

“I encountered, in the form of other people, states of Being that I could not place. I wanted to understand their reality,” the artist says of the impulse behind his work.⁹

“When the Painting Paints Itself”

As we have seen, the human being stands at the centre of Verebes’s painting, not merely as a figure but as a philosophical and existential phenomenon. The impulse to represent the human figure is as old as the history of art itself and constitutes one of its most fundamental subjects.

Around the turn of the millennium, contemporary “new figuration” emerged in Hungary with almost the force of a movement. One need only think of the Sensaria group, whose members are well known for pursuing a traditional figurative direction. They regard Tibor Csernus as their master and predecessor; the early works of László Lakner may also come to mind as a point of reference, while internationally we might invoke Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and the aforementioned School of London as parallels.

What distinguishes Verebes’s figuration, however, is immediately apparent. His paintings do not tell stories, as do, for example, the works of Gábor Lajta, Dániel László or Márta Czene, nor do they seek the kind of uncompromising exposure characteristic of Csernus. Verebes’s almost transcendent figures, his Titans, are somehow gentler, more understanding of human frailty even as they wage their inward, internal struggles.

By his own account, his painting expresses qualities of Being: the intensity with which a human being is capable of experiencing a particular state of Being. This is reflected in the titles as well. Within the Mudra series, for example, The Judge (2006) may evoke a negative emotional state, Pilate’s gesture of self-torment; Covenant (2004), Refuge (2004) and Disciple (2006) may suggest the giving of aid, love of one’s fellow human being and acceptance; while Sanctuary (2007), which may also call to mind Rodin’s sculpture The Cathedral, can signify dissolution into the transcendent. At the same time, the hands never become frozen into poses: they create the sensation of movement. They are alive.

“At first glance it may appear that these ‘new figurative’ painters have remained stuck with the nude, portraiture, landscape, genre painting and the representation of landscape. According to the avant-garde view, they should have moved on. But art cannot be practised out of a sense of duty, under the compulsion of style, on the basis of theoretical considerations, or from a need to conform.”¹⁰

Gábor Lajta’s reflections, written for an exhibition of the Sensaria group, resonate closely with Verebes’s own outlook. When a critic once remarked that “these paintings are good, but they have one serious problem: they cannot be developed any further,” Verebes replied:

“But isn’t that the point? To create something like a circle. A circle cannot become more of a circle, and then more of a circle still. A circle is a circle. It is what it is.”¹¹

One of the cornerstones of Verebes’s thought is the relationship between subject, action and object. Applied to painting, this means that when the painter paints, painting itself becomes his identity. In the intense presence within which his works come into being, the agent, the action and the resulting work—the object of that action—can no longer be separated from one another. It is in this state of grace that the painting may begin to paint itself.

“What Does It Mean to Me That I Am an Artist?”

In Sanskrit, mudrā means a gesture of the hand, but also a seal. It forms part of classical Indian dance; individual gestures express the force through which the human being may draw closer to the universe itself. Mudras are gateways which, complemented by breathing exercises, open towards wisdom. The most characteristic mudras are found throughout Hindu and Buddhist iconography.

The gestures in the Mudra series are likewise arrested moments of these meditative practices, manifestations of spiritual force in subtle movements. At the same time, they refer back to the act of painting itself—to the dance of the hand. To the process that, for Verebes, is every bit as important as the work of art that ultimately comes into being.

“Artistic creation is a higher degree of readiness for death—or, which is the same thing, direct participation in an existence superior to man’s worldly life,” writes Béla Hamvas.¹² Verebes’s mudras, his “seals”, undoubtedly set transcendent spaces and transcendental contents in motion; for him, creation is an “intense and tormenting need for spirit”.

Hamvas’s understanding of imagination becomes comprehensible within his broader conception of the human being: “what is required for the wholeness of the soul […] the perfectly complete, flawless, fully rounded and finished soul, in which senses, consciousness, reason, imagination, fantasy, intuition and everything else meet in harmony, can naturally only be the divine soul. […] Opposed to it stands the other soul, fragmentary and ragged, incomplete and unfinished. Yet the difference between these two kinds of soul is not merely that the former is whole and the latter fragmentary. […] The complete and entire soul, whose striving, nature, purpose and instinct are always to become more whole: the Makropsyché.”¹³

According to this conception, the artist of any age strives towards the creation of the qualities of the Makropsyché. Artistic activity engages with laws of Being more fundamental than those governing everyday existence—value, proportion, order, measure and rhythm—in order to discover the laws of the ultimate order of the world and realise them within the work. We already find such a conception of art among the Pre-Raphaelites, who understood the essence of art not as imitation but as the realisation of an order higher than that of the material world.

Nor, in the depths of Verebes’s painting, is it the machinery of mimesis that drives the work. Rather, it is an artistic attitude sensitive to the tides, fluctuations and gestures of Being, an attitude that simultaneously creates the space of the work and immerses itself within it.

From the earliest period of his career, reading has been of exceptional importance to Verebes. He has always possessed an insatiable desire to acquire a profound knowledge of the spiritual sciences and thereby construct his own “matrix”, within which newly acquired knowledge could find its place without difficulty. By his own account, once this matrix had become capable of permeating painting itself as an inner experience, the themes that came to inhabit his art emerged of their own accord.

He sought to develop his own method, which might be described as transforming intuition into the purest and most complete consciousness possible: finding an equilibrium between “chance” and deliberate construction without allowing either to harden into routine. At the same time, he regards his art not as an end but as a means—a form of mediation.

Among the many books that have exerted a profound influence upon him, Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, which came into his hands when he was still very young, occupies a special place. Through it he discovered that the events of a human life on earth—and, more specifically, the trajectory of an artist’s life—need not necessarily be understood in terms of linear progression, of so-called development, as the avant-garde proclaimed through its concept of the “artistic vanguard”. Rather, movement is characterised by recurrence, by cyclicality, even by a spiral progression. The painter, in turn, is capable of weaving disparate objects of meditation into a single fabric.

In the contemporary sense, this outlook is not particularly “modern”, nor does Verebes intend it to be. Yet this is neither naïveté nor defiant traditionalism on his part, but a profound understanding of continuity. As Egon Schiele wrote on one of his drawings: “Kunst kann nicht modern sein: Kunst ist urewig.” Art cannot be modern: art is eternal.

“The Necessity of Our Existence Is Action”

Carl R. Rogers, the influential American psychologist and one of the founders of humanistic psychology, set out seven characteristics of the “fully functioning person”. In his pragmatic approach, such a person is open to experience and capable of living fully in the moment; develops an increasing trust in experience; is not constrained in making decisions; experiences joy and sorrow in their full intensity; feels free to create; and acts constructively and well. Only the fully functioning person, then, is capable of constructive action; in his actions—whether their outcome is success or failure—he remains free and autonomous.

György Verebes understands the spiritual path as inseparably connected with art, and regards action as a necessary concomitant of both. Alongside painting, his practice extends into a wide range of other artistic fields: he illustrates books, designs stage sets and interiors, and publishes regularly. Music has accompanied him throughout his life. He is a pianist and composer, writes music for the theatre, and since 1990 has performed as a founding member of several jazz and world-music ensembles. In music, too, improvisation and the liberation of self-expression are of fundamental importance to him.

Yet what permeates every aspect of his life is the city. He has lived in Szolnok, at the Szolnok Artists’ Colony, since 2002 and has served as its artistic director since 2003. He was the intellectual initiator and a founding member of the Szolnok Fine Arts Society. His community-building and arts-organising activity in Szolnok, his inventive and active presence, would in themselves merit a special distinction.

“[…] I feel myself to be an artist, but with exactly the same force with which I affirm this, I am also capable of denying it. And that gives me a certain sense of security,” he remarked in a conversation.¹⁴

Fifteen years ago, at Verebes’s initiative, the Szolnok Artists’ Colony entered a new and continually renewing era that continues to this day. Structural changes to its operation, a new system governing the use of its studio apartments, its steadily expanding professional relationships, the growth of its public role and the widening scope of its activities are all closely associated with his name.

A visitor centre, permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, an events hall, sculpture and printmaking workshops, a communal studio and guest accommodation; a summer festival, concerts and symposia; cooperation with the Hungarian Painting Day Foundation and the International Fine Arts Film Festival; an artist-in-residence programme; collaborative projects with numerous artists’ colonies and institutions throughout Hungary and abroad—it is difficult even to enumerate the many areas of activity for which he has been a driving force.

“I am so active because I am striving towards a state in which there is no longer an inside and an outside for me. I realised that if I am active within but passive outwardly, it means that I have excluded the world. And I cannot do that, because the world is also me. So whether the intensity of my activity, of my presence, is directed inward or outward makes no difference: the two are equivalent.

“I returned to the marketplace because I feel that by doing so I help bring order to what surrounds me, and I try to spread that order, because I have come to recognise fully that this is the function of my life. I do what comes towards me. The paintings, as a very welcome consequence, form an important part of this entire equation. The intensity of presence and the quality of Being.”¹⁵

In her study Vita Activa, the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that genuine action actively brings forth new and plural processes, something fundamentally different from the obsession with work characteristic of modern society, in which the individual is reduced to an animal laborans, a labouring animal. Indeed, for Arendt, the vita activa is equivalent to the vita contemplativa: outside and inside are one.¹⁶

György Verebes’s series cannot be considered complete. The “intensity of presence” endures. According to his plans, his activity will continue at least until the One Who Puts an End to the Struggle finds its way onto canvas.

But that may be the subject of another study.