King Bug (1977)

Not far from Gyöngyös, Béla Kecskés, a peasant who had completed four years of elementary school, set about building his seasonal home, a field guard's hut, with his own hands in 1973. The timber-framed, thatched-roof building attracted attention because its builder and owner decorated and populated his hut with thousands of colourful little things. Kecskés essentially assembled the building, the ensemble, from pieces of industrial waste, presumably from the worthless junk, discarded objects thrown out of cars, picked up on the banks of ditches, taken from here and there, left by interested visitors, with which he later improved the wooden structure in its freer months and decorated it with surprising visual sensitivity. 

László Haris and György Szemadám, working together, made a series of documentary photographs of the outhouse, which were exhibited in February 1977 ("Element, Structure, Environment", February 1977, Budapest Housing Construction Company). Szemadám was inspired by the hut and processed the experience in a series of his own work. The main motif of the above painting and the structural sketch of the field-guard hut are identical in their main proportions, with several common nodes. Semadam transforms it into a beetle, whose colour treatment, the construction of folk art forms, the ambivalent metamorphosis and compositional style show the influence of the European School and especially of the works of Dezső Korniss from his 2nd Szentendre period (e.g. Cricket Wedding).