"You are not born an astronaut, you become one and the same can happen of painters and artists. Imre Debreczeni, who is a dreamer from Sarkad plays the role of a link between earthly and celestial things in his paintings as a kind of medium involved in a spiritual experience.
He thinks of himself as a painter astronaut and if he could, he'd prefer to paint in a suit or Darth Veder helmet or any costume from his favourite science fiction films. I know it , because he told me. He's not kidding. He's an obsessive sci-fi fan and a painter of science fiction inner space experiences and amazing dreams. He is also the stuttering superhero, director, but most of all cameraman and captain of the spaces of real and non-existent spaceships among us.
Certainly, much more than a real astronaut. He couldn't be, he's got an ocular axis distortion. His eyes revolve around the axis of his own inner dream planet like a self-observing probe, flashing up and down on the screen of what he sees. The most authentic Hybrid “Narrator” for the space-time curvature of flux capacitors. Sometimes difficult to understand, but a remarkable, knowledgeable painter.
How small a proportion of people are those who can eventually become astronauts and send a bad message to the inhabitants of Earth by slaloming through the stars or stepping onto the surface of the hollow metallic moon? "Houston sign up, Houston sign up, there are no words for this experience I'm seeing here! I can see the Earth! I can see where we're from, like a rolling glass ball from my childhood. Houston, I remember where it rolled! Houston, sign up... Sign up! We've lost contact! You should've sent a painter, not me or at least the Little Prince!"
Have we heard of texts like this spoken by pilots travelling up there? No, and how much could we learn about human nature, the changes of feelings in the universe, the romance beyond Earth and the spiritual basis of man in the galaxies without the help of all the special stuff that has been developed for years in secret in the laboratories of factories by professors with stooped backs and white robes and glasses. Dr. Debreczeni is also engaged in these observations, painting in his studio, mixing colours in the light of the night moon, the colours of his spaceships and the structure of their interior spaces, but NASA does not pay him the greenbacks for his achievements, but all the more the heads are waiting with their telescopes fixed on the sky for the green-bellied alien saucers to appear in the sky.
The astronauts on mission do not look at themselves in the same way as Debreczeni looks at himself and the outside world. Astronauts do not have an inner universe, that's why they can see it with their own eyes as chosen ones. But they cannot reproduce the experience. That is why Imre is. He would cost millions of extra dollars to be a space traveller blessed with a risk-sensitive sensibility, launched beyond the stratosphere where only rocket-armed iron birds whizz like a sniper's rifle bullet towards its target. That's how a good picture is made, Imre might say, if he did not direct his aim to infinity in the course of his work.
Just think about it! The childhood longing and dream of a person blessed with hypersensitivity can only be space, perhaps because it can be like floating out there, like in the womb when we don't know which galaxy we are born into, which planet we are born on and what amazing creature we are born into the universe. Astronauts are not such sensitive people. They are dolts in that respect. They are well-selected gladiators with the least amount of insensitivity in their unarmed genetic stock. So how is it that Debreczeni's kind of artistically inclined dreamy creature is out there, squeezed into the space capsule seat in his suitcase? Well, because a lot of things have to match in a space mission for things to work, e.g. the specially invented fabric in the spacesuit, perfected by the precision of seams every 8 millimetres by careful female hands, made by the careful female workers of a bra company for our first AMSTRONG to go to the Moon after years of painstaking work. Because they had to fit that garment properly to his body, so that he could easily take obstacles while maintaining the pressure in his clothing to perform his tasks and survive the journey back. Because the blood boils out there in the event of a faulty stitch, like the brain water, if a stain of color slips aside on the canvas or slips into the point in the midst of the harshness of the dyeing.
Coming back to the seamstresses who make the clothes, it can now be said that those who know what a woman needs are the only ones who know the solution to the problem of clothing for space travellers in a really strange way. Interesting, isn't it? Love is also a space somewhere, which is how Imre feels about space! Double space is whatever or whoever you fall in love with as seen through her eyes, and filling them is a huge task, because well, nothing in it, not even gravity, works as it should and everything can be turned upside down, like the space-glamour relationships between the motifs in Imi's pictures between the focal and the vanishing points.
His pictures are adapted to these conditions, let us never forget. One small mistake, even a pushpin left in a suitcase can have disastrous consequences in the shadows of the infinite silence of the freezing -150 degree Moon or stepping into the Sun in the unbelievable heat. So there are big temperature fluctuations and pressure differences, even just in the moods of the images. Believe me, there is a common overlap between painting and space travel. Imre is proof and his travels around his skull. The voices of the head in silent space are the most natural thing, like the blatant sounds of the Star Wars soundtracks that still ring out in us from the silence of his paintings. Imi is thus where he cannot be, listening to the emotions that exist within him, in that inner Mini Cosmos that one creates for oneself, preferably flawlessly, if one is clever, so that we can pull it out perhaps somewhere at last as humans ourselves, like the pilot in his suitcase sewn stitch by stitch by elderly grandmothers for their children, grandchildren or even for the space travellers to make a living for themselves. Debreczeni weaves and sews his dream children safely into his pictures of the terrestrial world, picture by picture, stitch by stitch, because from the Earth's perspective this is a big step in a person's life and not just for the sake of humanity. He is not interested in that. There's more to it than that, but for that you have to ask him between two picture journeys at the rest stop of the exhibition. Let's say here and now in person."
opening speech by painter József Pinczés
