MÉLUSINE ENDRE ROZSDA, PRESENTATION

par Françoise Py

March 15, 2019

In February 1957, André Breton prefaced Endre Rozsda's (1913-1999) exhibition at the Furstenberg gallery. This is the first solo exhibition of this artist who escaped from Hungary three months earlier. After Judit Reigl and Hantaï in 1954, this is the third Hungarian painter who arrived in Paris at the peril of his life that Breton defends. The text that Breton devotes to Rozsda reflects this commitment. The modest catalog displays on the first page: "We count on all friends of art and the Hungarian Revolution". In October 1956, Soviet repression in Budapest had already mobilized the surrealists of Paris who published the tract Hungary, Rising Sun. In his preface to Rozsda's work, Breton salutes "the prodigious surge of Budapest". Rozsda's work presents itself, he explains, as the "high example of what had to be hidden if one wanted to subsist, but also of what had to be wrested from inner necessity from the worst of constraints". Rozsda's life is entirely linked to the painful history of this country. In 1931, at the age of 18, he took the pseudonym Rozsda, a common noun meaning rust. His first solo exhibition at the Tamàs gallery in Budapest takes place at the same time as that of Csontváry, a singular painter praised by Breton. Rozsda arrives in Paris in 1938 and meets Hajdu, Giacometti, Ernst, Picasso. But, wanted by the police, he returns to Budapest in 1943, with false papers provided by his friend Françoise Gilot. After the German invasion of Hungary, he lives underground. He is sentenced to forced labor for non-enlistment in the armed forces and finally escapes. His parents met a tragic fate: his father, bankrupt, commits suicide in 1935, his mother is murdered in deportation. In 1956, he participates in the clandestine exhibition of the Seven at Esztergom, on the eve of the Revolution. Threatened because of his commitment, when Russian tanks enter Budapest, he definitively leaves Hungary for Paris. His painting is predominantly abstract, with memories: eyes, faces, porticos, constellations. The attachment of his painting to surrealism is contemporary with the rapprochement, favored by Charles Estienne, between lyrical abstract artists and surrealists. André Breton sees in his canvases with mixed, churned, blurred tones, with fragmented, exploded images, like a humus. He evokes the "magma of leaves turned black and destroyed wings". It is a "situated" painting, which takes note of the ambient decomposition to raise it up. One cannot help but associate humus with rust, the color of time. Rozsda left three short texts, of great poetic and philosophical density, Memories, Thoughts and Meditations which reveal to us his fundamental preoccupation: painting time. Matta, Onslow-Ford or Jacqueline Lamba, contemporaries of Rozsda and strongly marked by Yves Tanguy's art, also seek to express space-time. The quest for this fourth dimension, that of time, which already fascinated Marcel Duchamp, is central for this second generation of surrealist artists. Esoteric and symbolic concerns are not foreign to Rozsda's research, who will become a Freemason. His saturated canvases, without the slightest empty space, where even white is color and form, present themselves as a "dense fabric" that comes to life for the viewer, like a starry sky, an illuminated city, a fairy tale. Thus Sacred Love, Profane Love, chosen by Breton to illustrate his text reprinted in Surrealism and Painting. It is, the artist tells us, "the mental surface from which I can set out in search of time". The aggregate of lights and colors, the interlocking of signs, the superposition of motifs that are covered here and there by the imprints of lace dear to Victor Hugo, create a changing matter, a mosaic, kaleidoscopic space, which invites long contemplation to find, according to the painter's wish, "the path that leads there and allows one to walk there". Time of the gaze, time of execution (sometimes several years), multidimensional time of thought militate in favor of a "perpetual present". He explains: "I dream myself alive in a world where I can walk on the dimension of time, forward, backward, upward, downward; where I can walk, as an adult, in a time when I was in reality a child..." These researches, he also conducted them through photography. Confidential production despite its scope: 22,000 shots, preserved at the Hungarian Museum of Photography. Superpositions, transparencies, reflections create a world where the spectral and the contingent exchange their prerogatives. Multiple self-portraits where the artist, like Janus, shows himself under several faces at once create a layering of space. Reflections turn the world upside down: "I make destiny-boats slide upstream, downstream. The inside, the outside, the top and the bottom relay each other" he explains. André Breton probably did not know Rozsda's photographs, but he appreciated his drawings of which he owned a reclining female nude, in pencil. If the paintings are palimpsests, cryptic from overlays, the drawings on the contrary explore the void and dialogue with it. Automatic drawings, in India ink, with pen or Rotring pen, or with colored pencils, play with numbers and letters to make figures. They are often double images. They sometimes integrate the inner words that gave birth to them, like these: "Yesterday, I thought it would be good to die. Only, today, I realized that I no longer exist for a long time. There, I am delivered". In 1961, Rozsda participates in the International Exhibition of Surrealism, at the Schwarz gallery, in Milan. In 1964, he receives the Copley Prize, awarded by a jury composed among other members of Hans Arp, Alfred Barr, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Matta and Roland Penrose. Is it finally the time of recognition? José Mangani, who coordinated this work with me and who was a very close friend of the artist, recalls some significant facts that marked his career and allowed his recognition. This is nothing like a long peaceful river, despite unwavering friendly support, because Rozsda, who practices a meditative and slow painting, is little concerned with immediate and easy success. The authors of this issue deal for many of them with the relationship, so particular and so fundamental, of Rozsda to time. Like many surrealist artists of his generation, his plastic research focuses on the expression of a new space-time that takes into account the most prospective contributions of science, which do not contradict the intuitions of revealed sciences, esotericism and alchemy. David Rosenberg, who knew the artist well and is one of his finest commentators, develops this crucial question in a text with an explicit title: "Rozsda or Time Regained". Adam Biro, art publisher and writer, is like Rozsda a political refugee who fled the communist dictatorship in Hungary. His testimony on Hungary before and after the Budapest Insurrection is particularly precious for our understanding of this singular artist's relationship to time and History. Patrice Conti continues this investigation by paralleling Rozsda's work with Marcel Proust's work. He explores the analogies between the writing of In Search of Lost Time and the painting of the one who wished to "paint as Proust wrote". This new space-time will lead to a new approach to the sonic universe. François Lescun explores Rozsda's strong relationship to music, a relationship that transpires in a certain number of canvases. The author, who is also a poet, engages in analogical work in which, for our greatest pleasure, words, images and sounds "sparkle like a rediscovered treasure". Alba Romano Pace, author of a doctoral thesis on Rozsda, emphasizes the historical context and shows the impact of this painful context on his work. "This Europe with a troubled soul", according to Ernő Kállai, whom she cites, engenders an art which, she tells us forcefully, "plunges into History". Is the quest for time, in Rozsda, linked to his exploration of dreams? This is the question that Borbála Kálmán aptly poses by examining the different techniques used by the artist. Claude Luca Georges is a painter and it is as a painter that he analyzes the work of metamorphosis in Rozsda's work, particularly open to confluences, anticipating in this our post-modern era. The work closes with a fundamental text by Rozsda: "Meditations". It is an attention paid to a certain object of thought, time, doubled by introspection, because painting, seen as a time machine, opens onto the outside as much as the inside. The painter explains: "I make destiny-boats slide upstream, downstream. The inside, the outside, the top and the bottom relay each other".