The Postmodern era is the name we attribute to that period when artists looked to the greatness of the past to find inspiration for their thinking and for revisions and revivals. Logically, such a term could not exist without the corresponding period known as Modernity. They go together like Thesis and Antithesis, a perversion in terms within a relationship of balance whose evidence is there for all to behold in the instability rife in the twenty-first century and the grey ordinariness of the latter part of the twentieth. Modernity itself is relatively recent and constitutes a pure bourgeois invention, triggered by the social revolutions of the late eighteenth century, which aspired to put man squarely in the centre of that irreversible progression, the dream that informed such a major part of the last century. It is the time of the garbage dumps.
In what is now commonly defined as a ‘culture of ignorance’, where the concept of the market no longer seems to correspond to quality, but surpasses it (today’s unequivocally post-contemporary society, drugged by the financial Utopia and by social universality), the idea of the avant-garde and of socio-political stylemes has gradually been pulverised. Many works of contemporary art – too many of them – have become no more than a sordid joke, even for a public with a more or less discerning eye for art, where the market had given rise to a new aesthetic of art and of making art.

Thus does the know-how intrinsic to man become once again a necessary connotation of artistic making.

What has really changed today compared to the Grandeur of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes? Everything and nothing… in relation to the great onward march of History, which repeats itself, as always identifying and distinguishing the great, on the one hand, from the powerless, on the other.

The avant-garde restored a voice and political and civic responsibility to almost too many artists. Ideology ruled supreme, as state-approved culture and institutions deprived the individual of that same voice. The infamous masses demand high profiles and further deleterious levellings, albeit in the direction of a liberation towards new social and professional class structures.

CSABA KIS RÓKA (Budapest, 1981) was born in a Hungarian suburb at the very time when the West was making the maximum racket as it set itself in harsh opposition while the Soviet-Bolshevik illusion crumbled. This was the first sign of the failure of a twentieth-century Utopia, which took place when the artist was a child, at the age when awareness starts to dawn. It was to take another twenty years before his country, and with it its entire cultural identity, once again took up its full and rightful place in the European system, though just in time to witness another great collapse, in 2008, when the bourgeois capitalist model based on the matrix of high finance came tumbling down, leaving Hungary in the grip of a grim neo-nationalism.
This short, purely historical introduction sketches the outlines of an artistic personality who defies fashions, coherences and the avant-gardes in general, but is bound faithfully to representing what he thinks and how he feels. And his Painting: an almost dionysiac obsession with revival that passes through loss as it is made. For Kis Róka, passion and existential expression seem to be pleasantly pre-eminent.
A magnificent painter, he combines and melds the idioms of painting tradition in its entirety, while tackling its cultural and social roots head-on, together with the topic of the disastrous Soviet Utopia as a system that erased individual personality and suffocated all and any cultural aperture towards historical and human awareness. Kis Róka paints the historical tragedies of his Eastern Europe with a subtle analysis of what has remained lodged in social consciences, left alone in having to piece themselves back together from an almost genetic sense of relentlessness.
While his figures bring typical Magyar traits to mind, the phallus represents power rather than potency and sodomy reflects the unfailing arrogance of power as it oppresses and suffocates. The Goya yellow of his sky is war and blind destruction, while sexual perversion is the inability to find an identity and accept it.
Goya and Titian are his legendary heroes. For Kis Róka, such mythology is the very stuff of his intimate, profound being, the roots from which nobody, not even the artist, can escape: to his roots go his extreme thoughts, when relentlessness arrives punctually and with certainty.
The bitter smile that conceals tears of pleasure combines together with the acceptance of suffering to brush over certain aspects of Nordic Teutonic and Eastern-European culture, in which the dimension of the grotesque basically constitutes the bitter, sarcastic ability to laugh at ourselves.

The Cahier d’Art #3 will be devoted entirely to the work of Csaba Kis Róka, accompanied by a critical essay by Márió Nemes.

Mario Casanova, 2013 (translation Pete Kercher)

Ph. Pier Giorgio De Pinto © PRO LITTERIS Zürich.