Today, in the first years of a new century, we are seeing a period of revolutionary transfor-mation of culture and within it of art history. meanwhile, painting which has so often been declared dead is searching for new directions, somewhere between apparent exhaustion and regeneration, and is at present celebrating new triumphs, for example, the so-called leipzig School. From the outset, Károly Klimó has declared himself in favour of painting as an artistic tool that can express the problems arising during this transformation. We can assume that a man has a great experience of life if he works with such a sense of responsibility, completely independent of passing fashions, in order to meet the increasing demands of art history. "art today is like life today. it is the elaboration of the problems of the age," said Emilio Vedova, the 'grand old man' of italian painting, whose concept of art is undeniably spiritually related to Klimó's. Thus we may even take the quote as a leitmotif when talking of Klimó's work, which is characterised on the one hand by the uncontrolla-ble urge to open up a daily dialogue between the material and the act of creation, and on the other by the fact that painting is motivated by an 'inner need', in the Kandinsky sense. Through an existentialist sensitivity, his painting becomes a medium that expresses in pic-tures his preoccupation with the situation of individuals living in a world under constant threat from all sorts of dangers.
This productive dialogue takes place for the most part in the solitude of the studio, yet not in the least distant or detached from life, but remaining in the closest contact with the reality of the present. Klimó was for many years a teacher much respected by his pupils at the University of Fine arts and was skilful in creating relationships with them; beyond this, he has always been a committed member of the contemporary generation and a critic of society. his work as an artist, his debates with his pupils or the criticism of the situation at home are all the consequences of his understanding of the individual's subjective responsibility as an artist, a teacher and a citizen who has come of age. This is how Klimó's every act has become a logical and conscious decision. The sensuality of his art, its passionate but always considered gestures come precisely from his knowledge of the reality and his own social turn of mind. The magic is due to the power of his imagination. Klimó is often associated with the 'informal' style of some of his works. But these works have precious l itt le to do with forms of spiritual automatism and are, purposely, far removed from the arbitrariness of the 'informal' gesture. What at first sight seems to be painting by spontaneous gesture is, in fact, rarely restrained by a random thought; instead the sponta-neous movement gives rise to an exploring and confidently mature form. What is admirable here is the diversity of what he sees and what he lets us see, as well as the boldness with which he creates a unified whole out of the parts in sharp contrast to each other. Elsewhere, he takes the unit apart, changing the perspective, setting a new visual angle and thus giv-ing his thinking a new direction.
It was not stylistic effect that was significant for Klimó when he first encountered the 'informal' school, but the recognition of what colour means as a material and that this can play an important part in creating pictures. Klimó's pictures come to life through the material-like quality of colour and the powerful inner dynamic of the colour placed in the graphic system of co-ordinates, bringing into being a field full of tension. no doubt, what happens to Klimó in the act of painting is the same as the description formulated by Emil Schumacher, the German master of the 'informal' school: "The colours assume a form, the signs crave colour - i rely on them and this is how i arrive at my picture." Klimó has count-less possibilities for this at his disposal, from the physical and material-like quality of colour to volatile transparency; in a figurative sense, we could say it ranges from gravitational force to spiritual energy.
One of the specific characteristics of Klimó's painting technique is what Germano Celant calls the 'undulation of the surface'. he means by this that the density changes with the ad-dition of colour, or that in some places the paint is so thick that it practically has the effect of plaster, whilst elsewhere it is fluid and transparent. Through the tense relationships in the use of colour the artist creates similarities between opposing ideas such as empty and full, open and closed, inside and outside. in the same way, the richness of his creativity in his best visual solution can best be characterized by opposing concepts: forceful and medita-tive, constructive and expressive, terrestrial and cosmic and he does all this with astounding interconnections and concurrence. The more complicated the construction of the picture and the more closely the various layers are interwoven with each other, the more power-fully the finished work contradicts our associative way of seeing things, which strives to call forth some analogy stored away in our memory.
Klimó, the painter, thinks in terms of pictures. it is as if, during the process of painting, he was considering the taming of a lavish profusion of ideas. he is often dissatisfied with the first result and might therefore paint a picture over and over again; old ones too, if they are formally connected to the ones he is currently working on. he always works on several paintings at once and they make each other more fruitful, in many cases leading to an inter-related whole.
The starting point of Klimó's artistic principle is the archaeology of the inner world. his pictures often remind one of archaic drawings by the painters of pre-historic times, particularly those where figurative elements faintly make themselves felt. They evoke a sign language which now as in the past each of us has deeply buried in our own consciousness. other works seem to refer to landscapes but are far removed from conscious landscape painting. The graphic elements, which might call to mind associations with landscapes, such as the line of the horizon and other similar elements do not have any kind of representational function. Klimó's painting does not serve either the imitation of what is visible in the world around us or its representation. it conjures up the artist's emotional state and the openness that goes hand in hand with his sensitivity; his completely personal relationship to reality and to art. The basis of this openness is the recognition that there is no unequivocal reality, no incontrovertible or eternal truth, as seductive ideologies would have us believe - and as a hungarian, Károly Klimó has had to endure more than his fair share of these. Clear-headed scholars are obliged to acknowledge that the most unassailable insight can only assert a right to validity until the next insight. Klimó has accepted this uncertainty of limited validity as a starting point to his work and regards it, at the same time, as a form of freedom. a free-dom that always allows diversity in visual self-expression and in the course of which, instead of a misuse of the pictures whereby messages are placed in the foreground, they become spiritual zones where there is a place for both lived and transformed or imagined reality. With this practice and this perception of art, Klimó does not, of course, stand alone in a void of art history. The 'spiritual improvisations' of Paul Klee' can be considered antecedents, as can the 'intellectual vitality' of the CoBra group of artists, or 'notes on a spiritual state' as-sociated with Emil Schumacher. But parallels in the art of the present day also present them-selves, such as the painting of Jürgen Partenheimer or Paco Knöller in contemporary German art. The CoBra international group of artists mentioned above which worked between 1945 and 1951 defined its own activities as 'the art of the age of revolutionary change' and as an answer to a world it considered to be on the brink of destruction. as mentioned above, we are living in an age of revolutionary change and a 'world', the world of Commu-nist dictatorship in the eastern half of Europe, has been destroyed. Klimó's pictures bear elo-quent witness to this historic process; they are records that preserve the traces of a whole generation of artists whose careers were wrecked by an ideology, sensitive records telling of their inexorable will to live and their hopes which could not be extinguished. They are compelling proof of the wonderful forces human and artistic sensitivity can release. The following sentence is from adorno: "only works which express commitment have a raison d'étre." The word 'commitment' here does not mean primarily a political attitude, but denotes the highest level of concurrence between the demeanour he has demonstrated in his life and art itself. and this is what has always preoccupied Klimó. he does not regard art as an indispensable tool of life, but a tool of existence, which is no less than a tool for spiritual survival.
Dr. Alexander Tolnay,
Director of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
