Arp Kovacs

Ervin Ditrói

Israeli Daily Newspaper in Hungarian, 1990

There are many varieties of the colour brown. A brown ochre is a lighter,golden dash on a brown surface. The structure will be emphasized byblack outlines here and there. When we place a turquoise somewhere,which would not be noticed in another place but here it is very strong like alonely brass. The pictures are usually more-figure compositions but theycome into play as a still life in many cases. The figures are not definedvery strictly so the compositions with figures sometimes fade into a stilllife. There are figures reminiscent of people that are totally static and thereare stirring compositions where the line itself is stirring. By combining thefigures a swirl comes into being and at the same time, without our beingable to distinguish the figures one by one, it is obvious and clear that it is acrowd of people. They are sitting, moving people or people creating ascene. These figures are not defined clearly, their heads and limbs paintedas a hint. The painter lets the imagination a free flow without presentingclear abstraction. In this way this picture has the effect only few pictureshave: you can look at it again and again, it does not become boring afterone or two weeks. It may create associations and one discovers newforms within the composition as you can watch the play of a fountain for along time, the base remains the same all the time but details are differentfrom time to time. The Kovacs pictures have an effect like this.

The first-rate characteristic of the picturesque side is the harmony of colours. In the same picture the colours play up with each other and together in a certain scale but at the same time the painter uses a dash ofcolour here and there that has the same effect as the sound of anunexpectedly appearing instrument in a Haydn symphony. (Or, sorry forthe comparison, it gives the same feeling as the raisins in the cake).The imagination of this young artist seethes; he seems to create thesecompositions with ease. Some pictures are lively and stirring and somework with moving and live lines in spite of being static. It would be difficultto give a picture a title or a topic but all of them have their simile. It is adream world in a way. By telling it a dream does not seem real but whenone is part of a dream it is as real as the everyday life seems to be. Itdisappears when we sleep as the dream disappears when we wake up.A perfect characteristic of these pictures is being decorative. When we arenot looking for content, a concrete subject in them, when we see them asa collection of dashes of colours, they are very pleasing, yet attractive.Apart from the still-lifes there are no pictures that can be attached to acertain time, space. In this sense these pictures are abstract. It cannot besaid whether they were painted in Israel, San Francisco or Paris. Althoughthey were all painted in Israel and are works of a newly immigrated youngartist, they are no asphalt ethnography or exotic folklore. They areabstracted from time and space but not from today’s time. Concerning theform it is absolutely the result of the age named modern by us. I say thisbecause it is obvious that every person considered his age modern.Cicero or Julius Caesar surely did not speak about himself as “we, theancient people”. Neither did Maimonides say: “we are here in the middleage, so we should behave as people in the middle age do.” Arp Kovacsdoes not say anything but he behaves, he paints like a modern painter, a contemporary but he will not be untrue to the traditions of the old masters and the facts he learned about colours, forms and history of arts from his teachers or other masters.
His paintings: nostalgic dreams about a harmonious world.
 
Dr. Erwin Ditroi
Professor of Art History
Israel
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