My earliest painting in the exhibition was painted in Rome in 2001 and is entitled Omaggio á De Chirico. The intense spatiality of the 'swirl of colour' in the upper half of the painting is inspired by the brilliant colours of the purified ceiling paintings of the Capella Sistina.
"I was intoxicated by Michelangelo's newly discovered elemental colour combinations. But it still took a long period of research before it really became clear to me that the painter-genius had used the cangiante colour scheme on the Sistina ceiling, especially for the draperies and costumes, which had previously been written up in Cennino Cennini's Il libro dell'arte at the end of the fourteenth century and which was probably used by more or less all Italian painters. The manual, based on optical discoveries, knowledge of materials and the practice of all branches of the fine arts was circulated in manuscript copies in its day and contains specific recipes for solving certain painting tasks.
(My research was greatly aided by David Bomford's study "The History of Colour in Art." Published in "Colour: Art and Science", Cambridge University Press, 1995, as well as the 1935 New York and 2005 Milan editions of C.Cennini's book.)
Cangiante (Arabic word) means to play with colour, to change colour. In short: brilliant colour values are juxtaposed in such a way that one or two shades or transitions are left out of the continuous colour sequence. The cangiante colour juxtapositions are rather crude, not logical in their scheme, but based on personal colour preference, giving the painter a sense of new, pulsating, colour-changing harmonies that have been found. In some opinions the cangiante colour system, ahead of its time, surpasses the colour and luminosity of the Impressionists' explorations. This colour system has since been the subject of my practical painting and colour theory research.
Parallel to this in recent years my imagination has been very much engaged in capturing the essence of musical sounds as phenomena that exist in physical space and have a strong impact on the human senses, mind and nervous system. I strive to make the musical sound, the most intimate substance, recallable to the eye and touch by means of vision. Where is it when I can no longer hear it? Does it immediately disappear from the physical space we perceive? My strong suspicion is that it is present even after it has been played in time and affects our whole being, perhaps the 'dark matter', the 'dark energy' hidden in the universe contains the music that cannot be seen.
If heat, cold and warmth can be photographed and these images with their pure colours accurately report on real facts invisible to the eye, but everywhere in and around us, tangible reality, then musical sounds, sounds as bodies should somehow manifest themselves as well, as densification, thinning, congestion, flashes of material. Although this potential energy or something ready to sound everywhere is obviously in constant flowing movement around us, within us, it is nevertheless at least as much there in our three-dimensional space with the cacophony, inner lap, recurring phrases of an unexpectedly sounding thrush whistle as the often unspeakable, disappearing essence dancing on the tip of my tongue, on the edge of my consciousness.
The hypothetical "representation" of Sounds, Bodies of Sound, Chords is another one-sided siege and questioning of the science of physics on my part."
Ilona Keserű
