Baroque drawing (1976)

Ilona Keserü is a significant figure of the neo-avant-garde generation that started in the mid-sixties, a member of the IPARTERV group (Imre Bak, István Nádler, Tamás Hencze, László Lakner, etc.) and the Budapest Workshop. After graduating from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts she discovered the avant-garde forebears (Ferenc Martyn, European School) and contemporary abstract art. A significant turning point in her career was her stay in Italy in 1962-1963. In the mid-1960s, the vibrant, tangled calligraphies of his silhouette drawings from this period gradually lead to his large gesture paintings (Numbered Pictures), whose strong red-orange-black colouring replaces the dark-toned monochrome of his earlier paintings. In 1967 Keserü discovered the heart-shaped gravestones of the Balatonudvar cemetery, which she used in her hard-edge paintings in garish colours. From around 1969 she produced works with canvas coverings and textile applications, which she initially left unpainted to emphasise their plastic effects. From 1971 she produced multiplied prints in which she varied the characteristic wavy line of the tombstone motif (Forming Space). From 1975 to 1979 she was a member of the Budapest Workshop. From 1982 onwards she was interested in new optical problems: the afterimages of the retina of the closed eye. In the works of the second half of the 1980s, the motifs of her earlier period reappeared: calligraphic gestures, canvas embossing and rainbow colours. In her most recent works, shapes, colours and movements that are at a distance in time coexist.

Dezső Tandori, one of the artist's first knowledgeable analysts, warns that it would be a mistake to take the appearance of the Balatonboglár gravestone motifs as a turning point, a strict boundary in Keserü's oeuvre. After all, their antecedents 'gestural line drawing, drawing washed into a blur, semi-figurative linearity (and I could go on and on, cataloguing) were always "close" to the block-like plane line ensemble, to the spatial formation that was realised in the tomb stone pictures, which also revealed an archetypal form, and then in the canvas reliefs'. Keserü's organic, organic art also has its 'before and after' in the 'Baroque' drawings, which were made a few years earlier than the gravestones, in the images of the Roman and Sopron roads, Baroque houses or the arches of pebbles and the wavy lines that emerge from them. Later, they are materialised in folds, changes in material quality and spatial graphics.