Sándor Zicherman - Catalogue of Exhibition [antikvár]

You can always tell an artist as well as a poet by his voice. Unlike his fashionable metropolitan colleagues the artist Sándor Zicherman, who has lived most of his life in the depths of Russia, does not reveal himself to the public at a glance. His is a sophisticated and mysterious voice. The proof of a real poet are the classical forms of his poetry where all the falsehood and borrowed feathers are seen with a naked eye. Sándor seems to work in this difficult classical manner intentionally. Wherever you look at his pictures they always remind you something. But as soon as you sink deeper in to it associations come at the heels of associations, and you feel the work of art make music in ten registers at a time. All the long history of art's painful searches squeezes itself into those philosophically unpretentious still lifes, landscapes and portraits I call this method a method of a pile of picture slides when a picture is a resultant of many different pictures regarded against light. The old masters knew the secret and achieved the multilayer structure by putting on transparent and semitransparent paints. But as if recanting this unsophisticated method Sándor comes to his own through an overtly dense, pastóse texture. If you don't know him personally this peculiarity may not become evident at once. But I never cease to admire his encyclopaedic and - so scarse in our days - European education. By the grace of fate the artistic oeuvre of this Russian painter embraces the expressiveness of his Hungarian origin, the Academy school of Leningrad, the bright colours of the Orient and the melodiousness of the Ukrainian art. He is an artist of a dramatic experiment. Beauty may be compared to a razor blade. In Zicherman's works one physically feels this walking on a razor blade, the union of incompatibles. In this he is a dialectic. The place and time of his life forced him to keep within the bounds of realism and yet neither of his works can be called strictly realistic, it's always a slightly perceptable edge of realism through which an invisible vanguard is showing. He is always precise in depicting his epoch, and stylistically his works executed in 50s and 60s range among the best but unknown to the world samples. His archives are full of formal research but you can see nothing of it at the exhibition. His lively and impulsive muse melts every style of the time in the crucibles of his peculiar personal perception. This simple method transfigurates all the visible into a drama, a drama of colour, a drama of a fight of lines. And you can't tear yourself away from the spectacle of light and colour enlivening his pictures. The paraphrase of objects he paints on his canvases vary all the time. Mountains, trees and the space over a melancholy-pregnant road are moulded from light by an energetic sculptor, a painter has dipped it into a rainbow. Architecture melts and flows, fruits are ringing with an unknown melody, the strict pewters are pulsing with their dynamic colour nucleus. The surface of his canvases is a fortuitously immobilized movement of colour impressed on the granular plane. Colour lives a life of its own, and we are happy eyewitnesses of how it is thickening up like cooling of metal. And you cannot get rid of a feeling that all the polyphony of the great masters of colour has been given in heritage to the author to preserve and improve it. You can distinguish here the voices of Lentulov, Leger, Modigliani, see the colour of impressionists percolating, the pain of Goya intensely glimmering and El Greco mystically elongating the space. But Sándor's intrinsical impulsiveness merges them all into a mysterious conglomeration like paints on a palette. In our rational world we get used to the rational and cold art. And we always rejoice in our souls when we come across an artist who, with a freshness of a savage, stands in awe of simple and unshowy things. You can find not a single artificially constructed theme in Sándor Zicherman's oeuvre. He always discovers his theme in our mother nature and the breathtaking wealth of his superabundant methods comes from the same source. He needs a method to show how nature lives, and nothing more. That's why he is quite immune against any wearisome mannarisms. The tragical and laconic crossings of lines and alongside with it an exquisite, up-to-decandency hazy fluidity: but that's how his angular helicopters are hovering in air, and that's precisely how his waterfall is rushing down the mountain side! Constructive spots are organizing the rhythms of the crowd, but the light of his glass-blowers