Primal Patterns

“No, no. Presence is not an island. A chain of islands at least. I am moving in a long line, a chain of islands – take a look from above – they are passing by below, in the vast blue, recurring souvenirs of the Earth.”

Ágnes Nemes Nagy: Earth’s Souvenirs (excerpt)

PRIMAL PATTERNS

These pictures with a unique atmosphere conjure up humanity’s collective, archaic past.

Why do people explore the past? What answers can we find? What answers can we hope for?

Living in the Balaton-felvidék region of Hungary as a child, Sándor Bátai grew up with the everyday objects of the rural world and the clear patterns of the fish-weirs, screens, casting- and dripping-nets he saw here inspired his first works, made at the turn of the seventies and eighties.

In the late 1970s, he moved from his hometown, Veszprém, to Kaposvár, where he worked at the stage scenery workshop of the legendary Csiky Gergely Theatre for more than five years. This period played a crucial role in his artistic development as he met some of the greatest fine artists here, such as Miklós Erdély, Péter Donáth and Gyula Pauer. The artistic milieu encouraging him to experiment as well as his openness to observe the slowly evolving and changing phenomena around him deepened his desire to examine the objects of nature; it was at this time that he made his first surface studies as well as his first crust, rock and earth works. He strove to find a terse and universal expression already in these depictions and this terseness later served as a key point of reference in his art and entire oeuvre.

In 1995, he attended the Gyermely Paper Art Workshop, and he discovered that paper, a material that is already the end result of a transformation and moulding process, was the most suitable medium to realise his artistic ambitions; paper became the matter on which he most often records traces and which he uses as a carrier to document the signs he finds.

People’s experience of their environment is also the fabric of self-interpretation. Many explorers and scientist-travellers observed that the contemplation of nature stimulates the imagination and is deeply attached to our innermost feelings. Bátai focuses his attention on the natural and physical memories of his surroundings. He often visits the lapidary of the Abbey of Tihany to study ancient Roman and medieval rock fragments but the church ruins, special rock formations and other natural mementos – such as the basaltic tufa Buttes – in the Balaton region – urge him to explore the secrets of the past.

Bátai’s work method based on observation and recording renders this network of phenomena and connections extending over space and time visible and experiencable. In some of his works even the plasticity of the strata of memories penetrating and rewriting each other is perceivable.

Returning from his study trips in Northern Europe (2003) and Africa (2006) his pictorial universe became simplified and was more and more frequently reduced to points and lines. The crystallisation of form requires time: first it grows, layers are deposited on it, accompanying it and surrounding it for a while, altering its meaning in the meantime; this union is not eternal as the encrustation slowly splits off, leaving the base behind. These elemental signs – primal patterns – condense meanings extremely effectively: they encapsulate them.

To quote from Pilinszky: “The ambition of art is to get from facts to reality.” Taken up in the incessant and ever-accelerating pace of scientific progress, who can say how far the malleable boundaries of the reality we know and perceive, the boundaries of the present moment, extend?  How are illusion and reality opposed to each other? Concealing and revealing like palimpsests, Sándor Bátai’s works are testament to permanence and transformation: by accumulating and overlaying the strata of continuously expanding time dimensions, he opens up the path towards the spiritual that is inherent in all of us.

The puritan installation of the exhibition showing each work as if it were a ’find’ emphasises the artist’s characteristic archaising method and seeks to evoke a traditional museum environment.

Summary titles without dates can be seen next to the works, thus underlining a thought embraced by many as their ars poetica: “artists work on a ‘single picture’ all their life”.