Antal Pázmándi

POP ART

2010-02-10

At an excellent and fertile artistic moment, an outstanding master set extremely talented Antal Pázmándi on his course then and there when and where important artistic movements had been accumulating, major artistic events were maturing and the possibility of epochal works was taking shape. This fertile, extended moment can be traced to somewhere in the last third of the 1960s, and the master was the ideal art teacher Árpád Csekovszky, a supporter of up-to-date artistic principles who nurtured a great number of talented artists. The circumstances (apart from the upward-descending or downward-ascending historical-social-political relations of socialism) can be pinpointed in the disruption or separation of the set of rules of the so-called applied art branches determined so far by the massive components of function, ornamentation, technology and tradition. Apart from ceramics and glass, textile art can be cited as an important domain of the revival of applied arts, of the slackening or washing away of the rigid boundaries of genres. Besides the pleasure of crafting, modelling the material, among the aspirations, the hidden incentives perhaps the most important desire of an artist was to get rid of function, of the need to produce some practical thing or aimless ornamentation, and to achieve autonomy, to take hold of space in its magic elusiveness with plastic tools, to permeate this space with a unique object endowed with characteristically individual traits of creation and filled with content.

The early work of Antal Pázmándi is already characterized by an elementary desire to occupy space and an insatiable will to express himself in plasticity. It suffices to cite his diploma work: a pyrogranite sculpture depicting a hawk swooping down on flushing birds. Looking back on it, the artist says that he was interested in the vibrating dynamism of the action. Vibrating dynamism as a concept of sculpture was already present in Hungarian art at that time. Weighty support and proof are the best József Somogyi and Jenő Kerényi scalptures wallowing in expressive traits, or Tibor Vilt’s and Erzsébet Schaár’s glass works of the period exploring ever newer spatial and plastic dimensions, as well as the modelling and spatial initiatives of the Iparterv generation emergining at the time with shifted emphases. The vibrating and dynamic object of ceramic art was not quite unknown at the time of Pázmándi’s start: the ceramic structures of István Gádor, the architectural ceramics, reliefs and open-air compositions of Imre Schrammel, Árpád Csekovszky, József Garányi, János Majoros and their contemporaries constitute the progressive range of modern Hungarian art guided by a new outlook.

At the turn of the 1960s and ’70s, after a study trip to Italy where he could at last make his deeply profitable acquaintance with the latest works of modern art, Antal Pázmándi modelled his first large sculptures and he has not abandoned its scale over his career spanning more than three decades to this day. He has created huge compositions for open spaces or attached to buildings, others for display in spacious exhibition rooms. That required the elaboration of optimal technical procedures the ideal venues and media of which were sites of the Hungarian art camp movement: Siklós, Kecskemét and symposia in Austria and Israel.

Most of Pázmándi’s works are made of fire-clay (chamotte) fired at a very high temperature, with an unfinished or glazed surface. Interestingly enough, the moderate, often monochrome colours of the early period gave way to a swirl of bright coloures, and even transfer pictures, from the 1990s. The fountain sculptures of the ’70s, the monumental relief in Debrecen in 1988, the wobbling sculptures of the ’90s, the architectural sculpture on the Ürömi street house, the ornamental fountain in the main square of Debrecen are polarly opposite works, concerning the colour effects. Sometimes colour accentuates the plastic strength of the fabric of puritanic, bare and vivid forms; at other times, enhanced colours stress the masses and mass relations, the intense, exuberant effects of formal orders. Pázmándi’s artistic flexibility – now stimulated, now hindered by the surroundings and the expectations of the customer, is revealed by a comparison of the works and their characteristic traits. In autonomous sculptures and reliefs, however, no obstacles of the kind can be traced.

Although he sometimes deals with the same theme several times, e.g. he made several versions of the “Mannequin in a Gas Mask”, all of Pázmándi’s pieces are unique works of art lacking any practical function. The works can be grouped by the shared creative problem, aesthetic approach and formal solutions. These groups of related works signpost the different periods in Pázmándi’s career marked off by philosophical content, stylistic traits and formal characteristics. As a sign of some confusion, Antal Pázmándi does not stick to any achieved or desired, or superseded, aspiration: he is motivated by any new creative problem, the message to be expressed, the task and the possibilities limited by the task. As a result, one discovers brave thrusts forward and intriguing feedbacks, as well as seeming retreats between his groups of works. This is most obvious in the alternating and sometimes simultaneous appearance of figurative and non-figurative approaches.
Pázmándi’s career can be divided into three clearly delineated periods each of which is then disarranged by the creation of an emblematic piece of art, like the beautiful fountain in Gödöllő made in the period of pop art statuettes, or the nude statues of the office building in Ürömi street and the fig-ural motifs of the fountain in Debrecen all made in his abstract phase. The two latter works are at the same time epitomes of the combination of the two artistic idioms: of the strange unity of architectonic elements and ornamental motifs, abstract forms and naturalistic figures; of the utilization and synthesis of contrapuntal tensions. (Oddly enough, this duality of idiom is missing from the autonomous sculptures.)

Antal Pázmándi