Sun Outline III. (1970)

Sándor Altorjai studied at the Dési Huber Circle, then in 1958, as a pharmacist, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts, where his masters were Endre Fenyő A. Fenyő, Géza Fónyi, Gyula Hincz and Jenő Barcsay. Between 1959 and 1964 he visited the art schools in Sümeg, Salgótarján, Hódmezővásárhely and Kecskemét. He also visited Moscow (1960), Prague (1962) and Paris (1969). 

From the mid-1960s onwards, his friendship with Miklós Erdély and Ákos Szabó was a decisive factor in his life, and together they organised avant-garde events (e.g. the premiere of Erdély's film Hidden Parametersin 1968). In 1971, he held his first solo exhibition at the Mednyánszky-Terem, where Erdély read Altorjai's Manifesto of Brainstorming, a kind of Dadaist, self-deprecating formulation of his creative method (e.g. collage, montage) and his passivity and inertia in the face of the Regime. At the exhibition, Miklós Erdély washed the floor with chamomile tea water, while Erdély's two sons (Gyuri and Dani) distributed wet tea filters among the audience to help them see more clearly. The event ended in scandal. In 1976, Altorjai's second solo show was to be held at the Young Artists' Club, where he was to exhibit only one work, entitled I Apologise. Altorjai was accused of commemorating the 1956 revolution and the exhibition was banned. After facing his terminal illness, he began work on a new life's work. In 1979, Altorjai was featured in Erdély's film, the Vision and had time to assemble the works for his forthcoming exhibition, but he did not live to see the opening of the exhibition in 1980. 

In the sixties, he was influenced by the classical masters and his painter friends. In his experiments, he came close to sürnaturalism and the sürnaturalists (Tibor Csernus, László Lakner, Ákos Szabó, László Gyémánt). His works, created by means of a process of rubbing, cupping, depict characters from his individual mythology (Self-portrait of a Drunken Pig, 1970; Uncle Gyagya in the Image of a Red Guru, 1970-1971). These are calligraphies that form a kind of biomorphic, marble-like veining. Already from the middle of the decade, he flirted with Pop Art, creating innovative compositions from collages and their derivatives. What is more, one of the largest major works of Hungarian Pop Art, the asemblage Let me Sink Upwards (1967), which can be compared to the Pop Art works of Robert Rauschenberg, is also attributed to him. The Pop Art attitude of Altorjai's art really took off in the 1970s, due to his particular technical processes. He gave his creative methods specific names: nuttiness, totyography, demontage from the cleavage. In his last period, he stretched the montage principle to the limit: in addition to various materials (glass, paper, canvas), the dripped surfaces of his earlier dismembered paintings play a major role. 

The round, reddish form of the sun is a recurring motif in several of Altorja's works. Sometimes as a celestial body, at other times it is transformed into a human head (Self-portrait of a Drunken Pig, 1970), an atomic nucleus (Aleatoric montage No. 18. A. S., On the Onslaught, 1976) or an imprint, as in the painting Sun Outline III. The following text, written in the seventies, is from the legacy of Altorja: 

Dear Reader! Dear self! When you have understood these two sentences of exhortation, put down this book and caress the belly of your lover, or a wisp of sunlight. You wrote the book anyway, so why even read it.

But, of course, since there is no reader (there is not the slightest prospect of anyone but me reading this at the moment), I address this to myself. We can only write to ourselves, because we do not exist within ourselves. That is the only reason I write. Because I understand this. Because the sun has understood itself. I am called Alexander the Sun. (There is a limit to everything, except human stupidity.) That is, you, my dear reader, who were born from the sun and the earth, that is, from the sun and the sun (it is well known that the earth was torn from the sun)