Philosophers in the Garden
Colours :: Philosophers in the Garden :: Ada Vilhan’s Works
Author: Gábor Gulyás, philosopher, aesthete
Every year, more than 20,000 art exhibitions open in Hungary, of which over a thousand can befound in Budapest. When you consider that none of the neighbouring countries can boast such a high number of exhibitions, you may think we are in a pleasant situation with valuable benefits. There is only a few who are bothered by the fact that the dominant genres of Hungarian art are different from those of Western Europe or the US. If you walk into a gallery in New York or look at the exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the biggest fair of its kind, you will see that 99% of the works on display are not graphic works, paintings or sculptures – in other words, not traditional fine art, as is the case in Hungarian exhibition venues. From a genre viewpoint, you can find a connection with cca. 1% of the works in the Western art scene to Hungarian art. This also explains why there are no internationally renowned contemporary Hungarian artists today, and those who are considered as such from the recent past – from Moholy-Nagy to Simon Hantaï and Judit Reigl – were characterised not only by the fact that they spent their active years abroad, but also by the fact that their works were about transcending and renewing classical art forms. This is not to say that the 1% are absolutely wrong when they follow the forms that were last considered the most valued forms of the canon in the Western scene seventy years ago. Obsolescence can create valuable, lasting works just as much as a modern spirit. A good example of this is the strongest period in the history of Hungarian architecture, when renowned Hungarian architects (Miklós Ybl, Alajos Hauszmann, Ignác Alpár, Frigyes Schulek, or Imre Steindl) followed the stylistic trends of Romanticism, that progressive architects in Western Europe or the US had long since moved beyond and designed much more modern houses. Alas, Hungarian achievements were not only a great success then: tourists still admire the Castle Garden Bazaar, the Buda Castle, the Vajdahunyad Castle in the City Park, the Fisherman’s Bastion or the Parliament. Because these are unique, valuable buildings. I think this approach is also useful in the visual arts: we should not praise what is fashionable, trendy or modern, but everything that presents values.
Make no mistake: there is a lot of value in modern art (I personally see a lot more than in obsolete or traditionalist art), but I would argue that there is still significant artistic value to be created in classical forms today.
Tonight, we are here at an exhibition of works that follow classical forms. We see paintings that can be classified as abstract expressionism. Although the term was used a hundred years ago (for example, to describe the works of Kandinsky), it only entered the canon as a movement seventy years later, thanks to American artists, the MOMA in New York and a great critic, Greenberg. It is a fascinating concept whose non-figurativity is able to display the dominant spiritual charge that the artist carries. What can we see in abstract expressionist paintings? No traditional composition and no classical representations. What is revealed here is the artist’s inner self: their current state of mind, their subconscious spiritual world, their mood, a kind of meditative experience of the work. Judit Reigl, who painted works in this style in the late 1950s, once told me that such paintings can only be done quickly, spontaneously, without planning – she called this painting writing and perceived it as similar to calligraphy.
When I looked at Ada Vilhan’s paintings, I immediately thought of Chinese art, if not calligraphy specifically, and I still see the paintings as related to Far Eastern mysticism, especially Zen Buddhism.
It feels good to look at these unique works of art in our standardised world, which often feels quite mechanised. They are bringing something new, but with a noticeable attachment to tradition, albeit not Hungarian, rather Far Eastern tradition. Does this mean that oriental images are on view in Keleti Károly Street? No. However, alongside the atomistic, linear approach of Western culture, the holistic and cyclical world view of the East is also present here. The images are dominated by strong colours. Most of all black, which modern colour theory (similarly to white) does not consider as a colour in its own right. However, it is known that in Ancient Egypt black was the colour of night, eternity and rebirth, while in Ancient Greco-Roman culture it was the colour of men. In Judaism, it is the colour of divinity, purity, joy and victory; in the Kabala it is the colour of meaning (the colour that absorbs all light), while in Christian culture black is the colour of death, silence, mourning and sadness. The aforementioned Wassily Kandinsky developed a theory of colour and emotion, in which he described colour as the most effective means of conveying emotion. For him, two colours did not fit into the colour wheel: white, representing birth, and black, symbolizing death. I don’t want to jump around in time too much, but I’m going to jump back two and a half thousand years to Laozi, who in his work ‘Tao Te Ching’ created the yin-yang theory of harmony balance. To put it very simply and to summarize it, everything in the world is created and controlled by two opposing forces, i.e., darkness and light exist in a kind of dualism, each growing out of the other in a mutual relationship. Laozi called yang the positive, active force, the symbol of day, of light, of dominance – all of which he marked with the colour white. According to him, yin is the symbol of passive force, of the soul, of moisture, of night, of darkness – and Laozi marked it mostly in black, sometimes in white. Without going into the exciting and rich doctrines of Taoism, Ada Vilhan’s paintings show the yin side of the universe from a Taoist perspective. It could be called ‘female art’, but not necessarily needs to be interpreted from the viewpoint of feminism.
What kind of black pigments appear in the paintings? Ivory black? No. Bone black? No. Vegetable black? No. Lampblack? No. Iron oxide black? No. An even more “brutal” colour: manganese black. This is an excellent choice, because the only black known today that is stronger than this is the black used exclusively by Anish Kapoor, which he calls “dark blue” and which absorbs 99.6% of light. In addition to black, there are several pictures containing the colour yellow – not lead yellow or Naples yellow, but cadmium yellow, which is a bright, light, warm colour, and another warm, acidic, potent, active colour: cadmium red. Goethe, in the colour theory he developed, called these two colours the expressors of the soft effect and likened them to the minor key. Speaking of the German poet, he considered three colours to be the most dominant: yellow, red and blue. This is also interesting in the sense that Ada Vilhan’s most recent works feature blue – and manganese blue at that – prominently. In other words (apart from black), the three colours that are most prominent in the artist’s work are those that represent the trinity of mind, body and soul in Goethe’s symbolic system. Yet it is not only their motivic presence that we encounter in Ada Vilhan’s paintings, but also the different forms of references and allusions between the poles of mediatized visuality and contextualized visuality that recur as a hidden path along the main line of the vast aesthetic drama that can be described as the hunger for the absolute in the East and the West. And there are other colours in the pictures: white, specifically zinc-white pigments.
The colour of purity, of beginning, of emptiness. According to Heinrich Frieling, a well-known German psychologist on colour theory, white is for self-centred, individualistic people – a colour that is universal, an abstract idea without form. Wearers of it are big personalities, but often loners who escape into their own imaginations. If we look at Ada Vilhan’s white rectangular painting, we may first encounter a sense of new beginnings, but then, on closer inspection, we see how rich and complex the world is, which we previously thought of as empty. It is also worth taking a closer look at the other works, again and again, because they may say different things today than they did yesterday – you can wander and get lost in them… Some people will find this easy; others will find it harder or even impossible. My advice to them is not to give up easily, but to try to get into the world of these pictures. You will find out that it is worth it. You can walk through a garden divided into a number of fascinating sections by the memories of philosophers – statues of philosophers, if you like. You may say that I find this interesting because I am a philosopher by education, but I say no. You don’t need a philosophical education to enjoy these pictures. Experience the aura of the works. Step into the world of Ada Vilhan.
Enjoy the exhibition!
Gábor Gulyás