No. 16 / November 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Tribuna magazine, no.328 / 1st-15th of May 2016
In Antal Vásárhelyi’s creation, an artist born in Satu Mare, Romania, currently president of the Association of Engravers and Lithographers of Budapest, Hungary, architectural drawing and graphic line meet masterfully, under the sign of art and idea, in an exhibition characterized by a geometric approach of images.
What may seem at first sight a concrete architectural plan, is in fact a fanciful graphic artwork. The trigonometric coherence of the angles, which unfold in a probable fan, from the perspective point of view, amplifies the organic perception of the represented structures. The color palette is reduced, going as far as monochrome. Instead of austere emphasis, we are dealing with the planimetric opening. The illusion of spatiality is built not so much through foreshortening, but through textures. Dozens of shades of a seemingly ordinary gray can appear in the field of the same artwork.

What fascinates in the images conceived and realized by Vásárhelyi is the relationship between interior and exterior. The play of positive and negative volumes is interchangeable in the eye of the beholder. From here begins a true philosophy, with the necessary quotation marks. In order not to become too pedantic in front of an artwork with obvious playful characteristics, I will appeal to the example of the rhetorical question whether the zebra is white with black stripes or black with white stripes.

Coming back, the illusionist, trompe l’œil approach is not part of the artist’s lexicon of technical procedures, which also rejects the relationships between distance and saturation to suggest depth. Thus, in an eminently biplane system, what covers another graphic sign, it is in front, although the contours are absolutely equal. The true story of reception begins with the fact that the front-to-back ratios alternate in relation to the axes of symmetry. The viewer will look for a point from which to start seeing the images, focusing on the morphological big lines, which overlap the golden section itself.
The filigreed textures vibrate optically to the limit of Op Art, a border that they still do not cross, at least not on the cellulose support on which they were printed. Transposition on another support, glass or plexiglass, would certainly lead to different results. I conclude by nothing that in order to become perpetuum mobile, at least on a metaphorical level, Vásárhelyi’s artworks need only a first impulse. Paradoxically, the artist seeks, at least on a declarative level, absolute stability.

Beyond the morphological side, which plays a fundamental role in compositions, the iconography has gnostic and sometime dualistic origin. The theme of initiation, steps, cyclicity, antagonistic complementarity, or exemplary model coexists in the plans of the proposed temples. The numerous symbols, which find their proper geometric place in the economy of compositions, do not simply float over the decors with which they are graphically associated, but are integrated into the general ensemble, as structural architectural orders.
The architectural pseudo-drawing represents a special side of Vásárhelyi’s creation. From one project to another, an entire gallery of ancient, renaissance or baroque quotations has as its selective and at the same time constitutive reason the logical interweaving with modern architecture, in a wide, otherwise postmodern discourse. However, the graphics are not subordinated to the theme or to the geometric conventions of representation. The purely artistic approach ennobles the artworks, which acquire their freedom to be liked exclusively by the way they unfold in front of the viewer, beyond the meanings, through the aesthetic and decorative dimension.
The artist studied architecture and graphics in Bucharest in the 1970s, before moving on to Europe. After a period in France and Germany, he now has his residence and the printing press in Budapest. His collaboration with Romanian artists, many of them old colleagues and friends, is a constant of his cultural management activity undertaken in the beautiful capital on the banks of the Danube. In fact, I met Antal Vásárhelyi in the spring of 2016 in the workshop of the graphic artist (and also the sculptor) Mircia Dumitrescu. He was in Bucharest for his personal exhibition at ArtYourself Gallery, “Sacred Geometers”. His previous exhibition in the capital, “Grafart”, had been organized in 2014, at Galeria Simeza.

