Csáji Attila

“Being a small schoolboy, I was a fan of Indian/Wild West stories, even organized an Indian tribe. The teacher, having an excellent pedagogical sense, tried to revert my attention to the school objects and one day she asked: Do you know where the Wizard of the Rocky Mountains lives? Quite excited, in the afternoon I went to the given address.

After the ringing -even now I hear the shuffling as closes-, the door opened and there was the painter Ferenc Zajthi with a huge beard. Whom are you looking for? – he asked. The Wizard of the Rocky Mountains – I replied in astonishment. He entered the studio with a smile. I’m a painter as well – I said encouraged. He answered: Sit down and draw something, young man! This was the beginning.” Without exaggeration, we found as well our Wizard of the Rocky Mountains. We walk in mythic light-environment, ancient cave paintings came to life in the dark, flying across a nebula painted with light, we enjoy a cathartic experience inside a Trinitarian Abbey…

….the story continues with a ten-metre-high candle slowly burning down, but, building back in the darkness, it lights again, heralding: the life is eternal! This procedure was a part of the daily life of the downtown Copenhagen for three months. The symbolic flaming of the candle means light and reason, and it proclaims the memory. Candle and Lux: well, we are at physics.

The light-art is a compound of the poetic fantasy, the scientific research, and the engineering precision. The optoelectronic revolution needed to be added. Starting from the seventies, the international scientific literature of the laser technology and holography contains not only the names of László Moholy-Nagy, Dénes Gábor, Gyorgy Kepes (of MIT) but of Norbert Kroó and our host as well. The method of superposition is an international trademark. Supported by strong laser technology, nearly 300 objects were produced till now.

Due to the laser, the cooperation of artists, physicists, and electic engineers provides us new possibilities of visual expressions: here are the light performances and the holograms.

Another surprise: the staircase was built of the excess stones of the Budapest Basilica. It was legal that time. A part of the studio leads us to the future, the other back to the past. In the middle: cacti, they are enduring the direct sunlight coming down from the roof window. Remaining at ancient legends, we start to see the pictures with the objects investigating the runic writing.

We learn novel and great things about the light, when talking on coloured plastic chips and enamel paints.

The “Signal Bars”: a strange coded message, perhaps from the Present to the Future. the multicomponent material, covered by special stains, is causing a unique, iconic effect. The mixed paints, the light-reflecting metal colours, the low-angle illumination of engineered inclination give a new meaning to the artistic pleasure.

The barbaric island, Aru-Adu: is it myth or reality? It is not importat at all. The moral of the story is impressive: the island accepts the well-intetioned people while it becomes unvisible for the bad ones.

Alas, the 20th century made a fetish of innovation, while the profit chase and the narrowed emotions caused uninspireless. There is no problem with the avant-garde tendencies, because there are many questions to be raised again and again, and the world need always be reinterpreted. Incorporating the scientific achievements into the arts, and the cutting-edge technology help to redefine the very elementary possibility of the expression: the line. Using linear drawings we can reach the beginning of the time, getting new possibilities of vistas.

The light-painting is a technical art. We hope the time is not far when the laser will be a part of our life, to project peculiar worlds for ourselves, and we can intimate our inner transcendental desire, the desire to return back to the time when it was natural the faith and the magic.

7/6/2011 Budapest