Ladies and gentlemen, when Gábor Einspach asked me to open this exhibition, I must admit, I was not familiar with Zsolt Bodoni's works. But after just a few minutes of viewing some of his pieces online, I noticed a commonality between his artistic world and my own style. First of all, we share a strong engagement with tradition, using it while also turning it inside out, because only that tradition is alive which we work with, paraphrase, and profane, if you will—dragging it down from its pedestal of sacred untouchability. Secondly, we share a certain hybrid quality, a register-mixing mode of expression, mutatis mutandis: a collage technique, which is the breeding ground of the grotesque, and perhaps also the nostalgic idea of completeness and finishability, like cream on top of the exciting reality of a fragmentary world.

And at that time, I had not yet seen what you see and are about to see. Yesterday, late in the morning, I had the good fortune to spend an hour with Zsolt Bodoni and his works in these very walls. The titles were not yet displayed, the wires were still hanging, but the artworks were already in place, and what may be the most important in this case—the lighting worked: the external, the room lighting, and also the other one, the light from behind the paintings. In the former, I could say ordinary light, the high room felt a bit narrow, but then, after about fifteen seconds, it expanded, the spectacle began, as if the painter was taking me to an enchanted castle of art history, where nothing is what it seems, or almost is, but illuminated from behind.

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And here language falters because I would like to say, with reason, that the light comes from the painting, but it doesn't come in the same way as in Vermeer or Csontváry. So one might wonder how much this -from is actually -behind, furthermore: what is the role of light, what is the painting’s role, is this background light part of the painting, or merely an overlay, an add-on, a tool? What does the LED-butter-colored shade add, to paraphrase Péter Esterházy, although I believe the question was settled soon after the moment of “discovery.”

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This, as I understand, happened a few years ago; great ideas are often very simple. But for them to work, for this seemingly obvious idea to function, a serious toolkit is needed—both aesthetically and technically. One needs a lived, interpreted tradition, a well-developed painterly world, where there is room, and freedom is not calcified by the many small compulsions of conformity.

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The cliché that there is always another picture within every picture is stark reality here, because there is the unlit picture, and a few seconds later, the same image “under power”—if it is indeed the same, and not several images layered within, underneath, above, or even after one another. It’s as if sparkling, winding neon signs and dignified, towering church windows were being montaged together; profane and sacred reminiscences merge in this directed flow: periods, topoi, symbols, LED, and canvas—but not LED and canvas, rather... painting-cinema, light-theatre. The use and derailment of convention, the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the (backlit) dissecting table.

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I looked at it for a long time, we talked about it, but I wouldn’t say I reached the end. The shape-hints, transitions, and translucencies produce new constellations every time one turns toward them. The same world by day and by night, the bright side and the dark, the operatic effect, the use of theatricality and its ironic exaggeration, that is, its neutralization with some small grotesque insertion—sometimes as if he were turning the flickering trinkets of Chinese gadget stores on European art history. Meanwhile, the viewer constantly has doubts: am I just imagining this, or is it really there? I imagine it, therefore it is there, because what else would the image be in me, a simple viewer, than what I freely imagine in it, only to shy away from the boundlessness of meaning, avert my eyes, and wait out the 15-second daylight, only to start over. That is, the journey on Zsolt Bodoni’s thrilling, grand ghost train.

Take your time; it’s worth it.

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Opening speech by Lajos Parti Nagy