Istvan Horkay

Quite common is when a painter traces the pictures of one-time artists to learn from them, to crib their secrets, to employ their knowledge for this own picture making fantasy. It could be quite common; but Horkay traces not Leonardo or Rubens, but a text, namely the first handwritten page of Freud’s Entwurf einer Psychologie (1985), the mode how Freud’s hand was writing, how he transformed the thought into a tangle of signs and letters. On the write surface (all-permitting and resistant at the same time) the Freudian text appears as a kind of a culture historical frottage x if I may use this term in a somewhat figurative sense after Max Ernst. The text does not mean simply itself; it is hardly eligible. The meaning of the picture is born from an injury to
the tangle of words. The never re-whitenable surface
is penetrated by colors; constancy is re-achieved,
since the retraced (frottage), and all written
artpiaces lose permanency with advancing time.

The Poet would be happiest if he could express his Thoughts without Words.("What an interesting Admission!" wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.)"Someone, Somewhere" is how I title my Works, thinking of the Free Individual, who Himself has become the Center of the of Our Post Human Age, the Focus of Our Collective Memory.The Question is How to give Visual Expression to that Memory, so that the thus created Contents, can leave a Lasting Impression.An Idea or an Image acquires a New Dimension as it is combined with other
Images

Horkay, the application of the painting historical
element in the picture is a remembrance of an era we
are over; over we are the naive relatedness created by
perspective, and over we are the picture creating
technique that relies on the latter. The application
is neither parodistic, nor is an ironic citation, but
is an emergence-transparence of a pictorial element of
a past era as an item of a set. This set Ü writings,
documents, stamps, painted pictures, etc. Ü is not
else than some accumulated mass of culture and
knowledge that surrounds us as a fermenting and
evaporating hill of rubbish, of which everyone tries
to save something, as allowed by his own fancy and the
laceration and destruction degree of the hill itself.

Horkay’s Museum Factory series combines original drawn
and painted images, appropriated masterpieces,
photographs, artists’ signatures and commercial logos.
These elements are digitally assembled, i.e.,
collaged, to create a single, layered moment
reflecting different places and times. This work is
post pop, i.e., post modern pop art. Whereas Warhol
took moments from popular culture and turned them into
history, Horkay takes history and turns it into a
moment, as though the past millennium was a monolithic
unit of time."