JUHÁSZ Dóra

 

Liberally manipulated, homogeneous surfaces – occasionally with brushstrokes and drips of paint that reveal the directin of the paints application – mark the spaces which receive Dorka Juhász’s schemetically arranged motifs.

 

Iridescent blobs, which simultaniously suggest positive and negative forms , are positioned in an apparent grid-like structure over what is often a neutrally coloured background. We may see truly additive, organically conceived formations which sensitively reveal the „errors” occuring in the system, errors that arrest our gaze and direct our attention  towards the individual within the species.

 

One cannot close the door on the biological associations found in Dorka Juhász’s paintings.

 

The blobs, which have their own little living space and aura, strongly remind us of microscopic organisms placed on an object-slide; however non of this is prortrayed from an analytic or didactic perspective, as the forms define themselves due to the direct tecnique of painting. 

 

Tha fluctuating character of these blobs does not allow the observer to get too close or too distant, as one simultaneously attemts to penetrate and receive, depending on whether the spectacle is interpreted as an hiatus, a gap, a passage, or an object that has manifested itself directly from its environment.

 

We may simultaneously discover elements that are tragic, and ones that lead towards entropy in the works, as well as the joyous, buoyant, and creative energies of life’s origins. 

 

It is the simultaneous presence of these seemingly opposite qualities that lend Dora Juhasz’s paintings their magnetic attraction. Through their endless permutations  they conjure up images of different memories, and thus a spotted summer dress appears side by side with pock marks, and the archaism of stout pots from the village of Rév appears alongside the winking faces of holograms on postcards.

 

Halmi-Horváth István 

 

2005. Catalogue of Juhász Dóra

 

The paintings of Dóra Juhász may be wondered at like a natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mackerel sky or a feather of a peacock. However, these are not visual analogies, not the traceable or identifiable sources of inspiration. The surfaces occupying the form of the panel picture mirror by no means the imagery of the world, nor do they model the universal law of reality. If the viewer transcends his/her plain perception and starts to think about them, sooner or later s/he blunders into the notion of ornamentation which, then again, sets interpretation on an inescapable path. It precludes the derivation of the picture from the window-metaphor; it does not enable the painted surface to be comprehended as the plane section of the viewing frustum. The world of the painting appears to us as an unfolded oriental carpet. The square seized from the infinite plane is covered by expanding motif; the place of the repetitive elements is shaped by the aspects of rhythm, symmetry and the relation to the edges of the square – the boundaries of the image. Not even the shapes of the forms are alien from the prominent ornamental (and of course meaning bearer) designs of oriental carpets, rosettes, scrolls, medallions. Despite the continuous system of motifs, their compositional array recalls just as much the garden as the garden-carpets replete with flowers. (Nota bene: this edited formula reminiscent of the paradise garden is also noticeable on the tile works and bindery of Islamic art). The order of the patches is defined by horizontal-vertical axes. Although this systematy – in spite of all palpability – remains hidden, neither net nor grid evolves from it. Its imaginary equation does not belong to the order of the world, rather to the flowerbeds. In the place of roots complex, colorful, insecurely contoured but identically characterized spots can be found. Neither are they specified nor are they abstract, they aren’t anymore organic as they are geometrical. In their elusiveness bouncing between gesture and sign, not even iconography provides handhold, as the shapes evocative of mandorla motifs of Christian art may derive from the natural movement of the hand that mixes the paint on the palette – from biological automatism. Focillon’s precaution was thus not undue. We constantly fall into temptation in order to search for a meaning of the form that is beyond itself and to merge the idea of the form with its image, which assumes the depiction of an object, but chiefly with the concept of the sign. The sign has a meaning whilst the form means itself – as put in The Life of Forms. The forms employed by Dóra Juhász are patches devoid of meaning and clearly defined ornamental function, painterly islands par excellence, the status of which can be understood solely with the foundation, background. Their location is evident in relation to the boundaries of the picture; however, it is rather enigmatic correlated to the virtual plane. They can be interpreted as fissures apparent on the surface, absence or applied layers, excess, yet, they can’t be related to the two dimensional versions of decoration. The relation of patch and non-patch (that is positive and negative patch) becomes the key to the composition. This is the world of iconic evidence where decoding is neither necessary nor possible. The only tangible thing is the feeling of order. This order is that of the line of dunes, the rolling of coastal waves, the irregular march of the elks, in which nothing is recurring the same way, but the consistency manifesting in repetition is the most essential feature of order. As Apollinaire states: the squabble of adventure and order. 

 

György Várkonyi

MOZGÓ VILÁG

KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZET, 2008 May