Embodiment László Paizs December 12, 2002 - March 1, 2003 Paintings Sculptures Press Release Biography

Psychological Truth And Historical Truth in László Paizs László Paizs is essentially an expressionist, but he is a latterday or Neo-expressionist - an expressionist into bleakness rather than brightness, more aware of the grimness of the world than hoping for a better world, as both the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists did, at least before the first World War. Censored in his own country until the Communists departed, he cannot help having felt emotionally oppressed as well as physically threatened. He probably internalized this threat to his life and art - this crushing social and ideological pressure to conform. The result - the sense of being a human ruin - is what we see in his art: it expresses what was inexpressible during the Communist rule of Hungary. The tragically human figures that we see in Standing Figure, No. 2, 1999, Double Figure No. 3, 2000 (oil and colored polyester on canvas), and the even more astonishing King and Queen I and II, 1999 and 2000 (oil, alploid on canvas), among many other "burnt figure" works, as they may be called, are implicitly self-portraits as well as portraits of victimized human beings - human beings all but destroyed by society and history. I call them burnt figure works because they have a textural and even dramatic affinity with the series To the Memory of Book-Burners, 1986 (acrylic block sculpture). In these works history comes ironically to the fore: when the Communist regime was overthrown, the books of Marx and Lenin - Communist Bibles - were burnt. It was no doubt a liberating act - an anti-ideological, forcefully human reaction to an inhuman regime - but it was also a bizarre echo of the Nazi book-burnings, carried out as part of a systematic program of ideological enforcement. Thus the irony of Paizs's "expressive" works - all the more so because the burnt residue of the books and of the figure is preserved in plastic as though in amber. The residue becomes the memento mori of the psychological and historical truth - the artistic trace of personal and social suffering. Paizs's works are the holy relics of death elevated in an ironically sacred art. The series of oil and colored polyester paintings is a sculptural happening; the shadowy, splattered figures are a kind of abstract expressionist painting. They are at once flat, fractured, and texturally dynamic, as though the dynamics of destruction could give them vitality, thus overturning the loss they embody. The Book-Burners objects are also about loss - personal loss, as I have suggested, as well as social and even intellectual loss, for Marx and Lenin, whatever brutality they led to (a brutality reflected in Paizs's works), are part of Europe's intellectual heritage, just as the more enlightened books the Nazis destroyed. What makes Paizs an artist - an especially important artist in these trying times as well as in a Hungary struggling to recover from decades of identity crisis (until recently, it has always been part of an empire - the Austro-Hungarian, the Nazi, and then the Soviet empires) - is that he is able to turn the destructiveness of history into weirdly sublime beauty. He is able to pursue disintegration to achieve a new aesthetic integration, even if that integration embodies disintegration, thus resisting integration into conformist society. This is what Paizs's works heroically and ironically do, even though his allegorical figures are heroic ruins, as their antique source suggests. Paizs's works are about the ruin of the past and the possibilities that were never realized, even as he suggests that his burnt figure may be a luminous phoenix rather than a Pompeiian mummy. Donald Kuspit Professor of Art History and Philosophy, SUNY, New York Noted author, art critic and historian