About

Geza Csosz, even though he learned his lesson well in composing the accidental moment with precision, in manner of Cartier-Bresson or Josef Koudelka; he uses this knowledge from a rather original perspective. As often his children are the subject of his art, it is inevitably filled with love and intimacy. He does not force the style well learned, and the quasi spontaneity lends his pictures a unique aura, a differentiating feature.

“Things will work out just fine, if you let go.”     These moments of his, in addition to being spontaneous, are incredibly intense, at times even mysterious, or grim at others. They bear, however, no symbolism whatsoever: his abstractions are absolutely photogenic, and the message is the complex ambiguity of the reality behind these pictures. Geza completely trusts viewers to decipher it.

“When situations and thoughts/clearly coincide,/but without your being able to derive one/from the other/when deduction and necessity is out of the question/yet one references to the other/incomprehensibly:/this is when poetry has fulfilled its purpose.” (György Petri).

The key momentum of the aesthetic value is the density of the reference network of analogies within the work of art, i.e. only stylistic fiction can lend meaning to the documented reality in any form of art. Geza’s style has some banality and a touch of irony to it. These elevate what we see and scrape the ultimate questions.   “He who has a sense of humour knows everything, he who does not is capable of anything.

His “genre scenes” remind me of the world of Hrabal and Jindrich Streit, of the bitter irony that by the time we die, we could be quite good at living… I trust you to decide if this is the resigned scepticism against a petty, vulnerable life, or if it’s a way of posing wise and deeply critical questions. A speculative humanist is someone who, in theory and generally speaking, loves people, but does not love anyone in specific.  In Geza’s pictures I sense genuine attention and empathy towards others. “One can never control a work of art, as it is never certain, and only wishes to reflect on itself, and enables art to exist only where it is in hiding, and disappears.”(Blanchot)

Ordinary existence, in terms of art, is a rather thin medium, with a seemingly limited number of possibly aesthetic moments. Geza’s  faux naïf attitude led to surprisingly dense pictures, which have a total lack of academic tedium and boredom, pretentious surreal fantasies, or meaninglessness. Often, he entrusts everything on the atmosphere, at other times he just goes with the flow and leaves space for coincidence. It’s as if his attitude as an artist has a complete lack of intention. Actually, he is just very good at hiding it.  “People, who think it is God (or Serendipity) who controls everything, are not entirely mistaken unless they are set in their ways of thinking.”  Geza is definitely not a fundamentalist artist. His humility, intelligence, strong sense of aesthetics and his passionate commitment would make for an ideal combination in a perfect world… I can only hope Béla Hamvas, the Hungarian writer-philosopher meant it when he wrote:

“God gives you the strength to bear your destiny.”

Art does help you live, but what it doesn’t do is tell you how you can and should lead your life. Any artist is extremely vulnerable to isolation and loneliness, as there is no such thing as understanding, only misunderstanding.  You spring back from the concept of art, just like that of God. We think we know the meaning, but we have no idea, and yet this is our only refuge, our only chance of immortality: only art is more powerful than death.