L. Feher – English

LÁSZLÓ FEHÉR: THE INTENSITY OF THE INSTANT

The mutual influence of photography on modern painting and vice versa has been fundamental to the development of these two artistic expressions. At the time when photography was invented, painting started to turn towards the recreation of the “instant” created by a previous photographic image. Furthermore, it dared to favour innovative compositions base on a decentralised point of view, like views from a capricious photographic perspective.

On the other hand, many photographers, hoping to be considered artists, attempted to reproduce pictorial elements in their photographs, by resorting to the appropriate chemical materials and to blurred images to create textures that resembled pictorial veiling, achieving absolutely innovative results. Back then, still life photographs were popular artworks that attempted to reproduce the pictorial compositions typical of the genre, previously copied thousands of times by academic painters.

That is all history now, though. In contemporary artistic production, painting and photography have gone beyond influencing each other to form a sort of hybrid that unreservedly incorporates both the new techniques that have appeared (film, video, digital technology…) and narrative structures thereof derived (advertising, comics, music videos ,etc.). Thus in the art of László Fehér (Székesfehérvár, Hungary, 1953), the relationship between the language of photography and of painting is a clear example of how both spheres currently develop in a new dimension.

Fehér’s art came into the limelight in the mid-60s and, given the narrative character of his paintings and the historical in which they appeared, it was pigeonholed in the Hyper-realism movement. Soon his palette became restricted to white, black and grey, echoing old photographic images. These portraits were drawn with fragile, almost transparent, outlines, on empty backgrounds, always accompanied by an element that provided spatial identification: solid columns, large statues, staircases, verandas…Figures leading insignificant narrations next to grandiloquent monuments, as if the weight of history had reduced them. Many of these initial paintings render fragments of 1950s Budapest, a slightly greyish reality, a sad beauty, characters seemingly resigned to the historical fate they have been allocated. The exactness of Hyper-realism seems somewhat cold and distant compared to László Fehér’s nostalgic images.

The frequent biographic and historical references (the portrait at the doors to the Budapest ghetto, the figure in the citadel at the food of the symbolical statue of Szabad Ságzobor the boy praying in the synagogue…) reveal the origin of many of these images, which are inspired by old family photographs. They depict scenes from the past which despite the years, are still remembered. Like those moments of our lives that we can remember clearly even when we can only describe them with a few specific details that we have somehow retained in our memory, despite the other many details which, for some reason, have been forgotten. Our memory – and our memories- is always selective.

The photography-painting association has changed recently, both in terms of the possibilities offered by digital and, in this case, in terms of the perception that the artist has of his or her environment. Now the characters that inhabit Fehér’s art (his wife, children, himself) no longer seem to be part of his past, they seem real, they are here, close to the viewer. Sometimes they seem to have been caught off guard by the camera, other they seem to know where it is, looking into it defiantly, flirting with it. At times, the camera lens seems to be only centimetres away, presenting amazing proportions: a cheek or an eye reflected in a car window, or the deformed vision of a face seen through a glass or lit by a torch. They are always family scenes that occur in banal situations (at home, in the car); they resemble normal images taken with a simple digital camera. The figures are still isolated in space, accompanied only by a piece of furniture or a fragment of an object on a monochrome background. They seem to want to underline the essential, distancing it from the unimportant details.

By presenting objectively documented portraits, the artist, who uses photography and painting complementarily, continues to revel in the selective capacity of the gaze, in the subjective representation of their reality . He no longer works with nostalgic images of the past, although his scenes are still quite charming and, despite the banality of the situation they reflect, his art reveals the emotion of a past moment. We, as receivers of these images, become aware of those moments, which resemble instants that are key to our experiences, to moments that grant meaning to our reality. A specific instant, a situation, a person; events, the people that surround us, the people we love; ordinary moments hat grant an unrepeatable meaning to our lives and that, also, remind us of the inexorable passing of time, of the fleetingness of our existence.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall

(Lápiz n° 252 April, 2009)