English / Nederlands

Red and Blue Fires

The paintings by Mariann Benko are finished and unfinished, at the same time.

Eternal change develops a personality measured in human emotions. Human characteristics turn into parts of nature, or natural processes get filled with the power of emotions and spirit shaping into images organized into harmonies but containing also illuminating dissonances.

Changing experiences, events transferred by time and interactions of emotional states are integrated by the artist's internal vision. Her image-creations offer the viewer taking the spectacle in and looking for identification points such a joyful visual experience and rationalized program that she is able to discover her own best spiritual characteristics.

BM's works are not one-sidedly true and beautiful. She does not limit herself to only showing the captivating, instead her landscapes integrate the dialectically contradictory nature of phenomena. Thus, her work becomes poetic. Hers is visual poetry revealing her passions, working against absolute perfection, leaving also room for change and it is both finished and unfinished, at the same time.

Everything is flooded by reds and blues and the layers of colour piled on top of each other quickly fill up the space. Ragged purple glimmers pour into the cavities permeated by red and blue flames. The landscape gradually becomes quiet and still. But not for too long, because yellowish pearl necklaces are coming from an unidentifiable dimension of the painting.

The crystallized logic of the past with its experiences, of the red, blue and purple disintegrate in a matter of a second. They are coming with winds and showers claiming the intensity of perfection. They are fighting, uniting and dominating just to disappear in the depth, in the greedy folds of cracks. The traces they leave are hardly noticeable.

Horizons are deposited on each other just to break up again. Trees grow branches and strong roots. Fires and waters generate each other in the harmonies of colours, lines and spots.

Gestures reopen, flexible veins turn into fossilized forms and throbbing meeting points get transformed into colourful centres. Carefully constructed geometric networks of lines melt into patches of colour and wide brush strokes fill the grooves of sharp pencils. Loose, wet fabrics get out in the sun. They are getting dry shrinking and creating a sense of vegetation overgrowing everything.

But it is not a natural vegetation. It is the vegetation of human will that is out to set everything in motion including the spirit, the revelation, the creation and the imagination, although...hopelessly searching for secret points of stillness.

Everything is by chance and everything is controlled by feeling. Along with the endless concentration, the magic and pathos of the moment, however, experiences and contradictory thoughts related to them get colour and shape according to a visual logic.

Planes clash and get organized into spaces, open up and close down, take off and fly far away or break up like fog. And then they reappear, hitting the ground having turned into glass chards, spurting into a thousand new shapes, sparkling in the light, splashing into water and calming down into quiet waves.

Blues luxuriate ethereally and immaterially. They are still very much alive and they are very much dying. The landscape is getting whiter, the flowers are cocooning and the bodies of water fall into a rigid and icy dream.

All encompassing fine laces hiding behind patches of colour, break up at certain spots to let their black-blood-turned-white pour onto the planes of colour piling up on top of each other. Then they sound and quiet down together, mix and cancel each other out searching for eternal peace.

Myriads of lights suddenly flaring up then disappearing but leaving traces, depths and heights, distances and closenesses, touches and teachings blend into each other. The multitude is expanding and narrowing, growing and shrinking constantly shaping up. It is thriving towards centres just to break out of them creating new centres and starting points.

Everything is in a process of constant change including the face of nature, of the landscape, of the environment and of human beings.

According to the interplay of opposites, however, the constantly burning energy finally calms down, and gets organized into fateful rhythms, solidifies and breaks up into individual image-creations. They are more emphatically lonely and impersonal, but always speaking to emotions and the intellect.

These are BM's faith and truth that she is willing to share with us.

László Hefter