The Body of Time

The relationship between body and time, the material and temporal limits of our existence, have long preoccupied us as human beings compelled to confront and accept the fact of our mortality. Can time have a body? This is the question we find ourselves asking as we contemplate the paintings of György Verebes.

The logical answer, of course, is no. Yet this is true only if by body we mean physically bounded matter. Time, after all, is not an object, not something tangible that can be grasped or touched. In physical terms, it is better understood as a dimension or a relation: the sequence of changes, the relationship between events.

And yet time is capable of becoming embodied through memory and experience—or, more precisely, the traces of time become part of memory and acquire a physical dimension. Greying hair, deepening wrinkles, fading scars, mottled skin, calloused palms: all are imprints of time. In this way, the body becomes a bearer of time; more precisely, the body—and the human body in particular—becomes one of the forms of time.

The visual arts are capable not only of representing time and the body as one of its forms, but also of embodying time itself: of transforming it into bounded physical matter, into something tangible and touchable—into a work of art. This is the paradox of the relationship between existence and art, and at the same time evidence that there is no higher form of human action than art, since neither science nor any other human activity is capable of this kind of creation. All this resonates with Nietzsche’s conception of art as the fundamental metaphysical activity of humankind and, consequently, the highest form of human activity.

The key, nevertheless, is the human being, for ultimately time exists only for us and through us: we count it, measure it and keep track of it; no one and nothing else does so. Following Aristotle, we might say that the counting of time is the work of the soul: time may exist as a dimension independently of us, but consciousness of time exists only where there is a soul. More precisely, we ourselves are time. Martin Heidegger, in a sense, saw the matter differently: time does not become embodied in something; rather, human existence itself is the “body” of time.

The vulnerability of human existence, the transformation of our bodies, their slow—and sometimes strikingly rapid—decline, in other words the finitude of our existence, is what makes time tangible, what renders the abstract concrete. The works of art we create, including the paintings of György Verebes, only appear to represent time, its passing, or its effects upon the body. In reality, they are themselves present as time become body.

Painting, then, does not represent time: it embodies it.

Moreover, painting is capable of something for which film or photography is less well suited: compressing multiple temporalities into a single moment. It can simultaneously reveal a movement or a gaze and what happened before and after it. It discloses what has long ceased to exist and yet remains present.

In Verebes’s work, this is realised most fully in the series Faces of the Intermediate State, while these paintings also visualise the transitional state between death and rebirth described in Tibetan Buddhist teachings, in which the soul abides after leaving the physical body. We might call this a state outside time—and outside the body—yet in Verebes’s paintings the body of time is nevertheless present: in the faces of the dead and in the souls hovering around them.

None of this is diminished by the fact that the palpable conceptual coherence of Verebes’s painting—its consistently employed stylistic features organising structures and thematic blocks—was not initially the product of conscious artistic intention. He found his subjects instinctively—or, rather, the subject found him:

“The first face appeared on the picture surface as though emerging from a cloud. There was no prior concept or intention whatsoever. I simply noticed that it was there, barely recognisable at first, but later, as my eyes grew accustomed to the sight, increasingly distinct, until finally it seemed almost radiant,” the artist recalled in 2025. “There was nothing I could do but accept it. As they came one after another, all I had to do was recognise them. Faces, hands.”

And although the bodies—or the souls separating from them—also appear to be in motion in Faces of the Intermediate State, what we see is not in fact the representation of movement, but time as memory.

For Verebes, the body is not simply an aggregate of bone and flesh, skin stretched over flesh, hair and nails. It is, rather, the way in which existence “appears” and becomes present. The body renders the invisible visible, and it is this process by which time becomes embodied that fascinates him.

His representations of the body give form to that which would otherwise fall apart, whether in his paintings of closed-eyed faces, the hands of the Mudra series, or the faceless living or dead figures of the Soma Sema cycle. In Verebes’s work, time has a body; memory has a body; pain and vulnerability have bodies; the profane has a body, and so does the sacred.

There is neither past, present nor future in his work, only time become body, stretched taut. Here we hear an echo of Einstein’s thought that the distinction between past, present and future is only a “stubbornly persistent illusion”.

Our illusion.

Narrative is of no importance in Verebes’s paintings. In his work, too, the world does not happen. It is.

Although György Verebes is interested in the teachings of many major figures of both European and Eastern philosophy, he does not seek to explain the propositions of Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Heidegger or Einstein concerning time and space, or the body of time. He merely reflects upon them and puts them to use in his own thinking.

He handles time as though it were matter: he stretches it, compresses it, makes it vulnerable.

In other words, he makes time rather than representing it.

Many of his works evoke the notion of incompleteness, as though he had stopped painting them before they were finished. Incompleteness normally induces the idea of imperfection, the sensation that something is lacking; yet Verebes’s works do not strike us as imperfect in the least. The point is precisely that something is missing from them. They appear still to be in the process of becoming, as though we ourselves were inside the time of their creation, inside the unfolding event itself.

It is precisely this state of “becoming” that matters, for it is through this that Verebes is best able to grasp time. Not a time that passes, but a time that is, and that, in being, shapes us. Hence the contorted bodies, the blurred and unidentifiable faces, the indistinct figures.

In her 2024 volume on the work of György Verebes, Anica Rudolf likewise emphasises that in the Soma Sema paintings the faces are unseen or 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.”

Verebes is a highly accomplished painter, in the academic sense of the term as well.

His works evoking the symbolic or ritual hand gestures described by the Sanskrit-derived word mudra recall the paintings and consummate craftsmanship of some of the greatest figures in the history of art—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Caravaggio—without ever feeling derivative. Verebes has created an artistic language and an autonomous visual world entirely his own.

He has also succeeded, after the radical dismantling and reinterpretation undertaken by the twentieth-century avant-garde, in convincing us that something new and valid can still be created within figurative painting through the painted representation of the human body on canvas.

This became possible because he never sought to conform to the curatorial and critical expectations by which the concepts of contemporaneity and progress have been—and continue to be—defined, presenting the history of art as though it could be described only in terms of continuous linear development.

Discussing Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, a book that exerted a profound influence on the artist, Anica Rudolf has likewise observed that, in contrast to this conception, the events of a human life on earth—and, more specifically, the trajectory of an artist’s life—are “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.”

In connection with the almost pastel greens and blues characteristic of György Verebes’s visual world, and the yellow-tinged pinks of his faces and bodies, Anica Rudolf rightly notes that “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 artistic self-awareness described above, the gentle rebellion founded upon respect for tradition, and an intellectually grounded attitude that regards mastery of the craft as its indispensable foundation: these are the qualities that characterise György Verebes at the age of sixty.

Through his works, we may perhaps come closer to answering those enduring questions concerning the relationship between body and time, and the material and temporal limits of our existence.

Questions that, when standing before the paintings of György Verebes, ultimately become one:

Can time have a body?