The voice of Nina Simone plays in my head,
“Love me, love me, love me, say you do.
Let me fly away with you.
For my love is like the wind.
And wild is the wind,” touching words from the song Wild is the Wind.
The song was written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the eponymous film directed by Hungarian American George Cukor in 1957 and like this exhibition, If I Mix Black With the Concept Backwards at INDA Gallery in Budapest, it focuses on the wind as more than a metaphor, but rather as an active dimension through which we define ourselves, an invisible force, felt, rather than seen. The works of Endre Koronczi as large scale paintings, smaller serial drawings, photographs, and video works are embodiments of the wind, created from the collection of concepts, reflections, and internal experiences, which emerge into art through the hand of the artist.
Installation view at INDA Gallery Budapest | Photo © Anne Murray
In them, I see the sirocco again, the heat traveling with it from the North of Africa, the desert sand shows us its form. The Mistral of Southern France comes to mind and the many paintings by artists of the past, such as Van Gogh, depicting the wind’s effect on the tall pillars of the cyprus trees. “I can paint – and not illustrate – best what I cannot see. This makes the painter happy: no likeness to be recreated that would disturb my vision. I must pay attention to other things. The presence. Its presence in a given space. The movement, the continuity, the flow that fills the space. Space and wind are surely identical in one aspect: they are both invisible,” Koronczi writes in his statement about his work in the exhibition.
Installation view at INDA Gallery Budapest | Photo © Anne Murray
The power of translation from one experience to another, of synesthesia itself, bringing one sense in place of another, is felt here, defying gravity, and lifting us with it into the powerful vortex, swept up in the currents of air, the chaos of space, which is also time. “Although, we have tools to show what space is. We have several painting methods to achieve this. But for now, let’s choose the most puritan, reserved, clear approach. White canvas, black material and one tool of our choosing. Forget the colours and tones and unnecessary equipment. But choose a big surface. Big enough to invoke the brush to move. Big enough to allow the brush to flow and match the speed of the wind blowing above the canvas. My hand moves in the wind. Moves with it, in the same direction or against it. This is how the material is distributed on the white surface. And if I do well, a space is created on the canvas. Instead of paint, I can now see the space where the air moves, where wind stirs,” the artist continues.
Installation view at INDA Gallery Budapest | Photo © Anne Murray
I observe the painted surface, the wilderness of darkness, imagining the wind moving, forcing its own depiction as its strength across a river’s surface. A tempest conjuring, raising a kind of havoc and then subsiding, a gentle touch. I am pulled into the drawings, the eddying swirls of structure, much like the tangles of hair I comb out each day, following paths, but inevitably wrapped in upon itself, as if these forces themselves form a magnetic center. The lines grow dark, then lighten, separate, dancing dervishes, spinning and lifting, then floating gracefully down upon the heavier base of air. There is a magical aspect, an otherness, and yet, the feeling of air as an embrace, a soft cushioning to the complex movements of energy in which we could become entangled without it.
Artist Endre Koronczi at INDA Gallery with visitors | Photo © Anne Murray
“While I paint, I become part of the painting’s space. I don’t have to peek out from it or look up at the horizon, I am in the painting. And either way, I would not be able to see a thing. But we are in it now. I, in the space of the painting, and the painting, in the wind. I painted it around me. I painted space. Wind,” writes Koronczi in further explanation. Indeed he has shown us the wind through a tempest of lines, of black and white, of erased and superimposed, of space and fullness, emptiness, and darkness.
« If I mix black with the concept backwards » - Endre Koronczi
16 June 2021 – 1 October 2021
