Tamási Claudia

Opening remarks by János Kósa at the exhibition titled CL by Claudia Tamási on 29 August 2001.

More than a year and a half ago, at the end‑of‑year exhibition at the Faculty of Fine Arts, I first noticed a young woman who was doing intriguing things in her painting. In the medium‑sized canvases she presented at the time, various enlarged body and facial details appeared – a fragment of an eye, a tip of a nose, a line of a mouth. It was as if a cut‑out had given us a glimpse onto a gigantic female Gulliver, leaving us only to catch tiny details with our sight. As time passed, the branching themes gradually narrowed, and ultimately Claudia’s focus turned to the mouth, to her own mouth. A glimpse of this series can be seen in this room.

Indeed, it is at once a lyrical self‑portrait and a distancing generalisation. A self‑portrait, because the artist always paints her own lips, with a variety of possibilities, as a lyrical self‑confession. It is also general, summarising and emblematic, for the mouth, in its own right, is an icon that in twentieth‑century painting has become rather conventional, closed and fixed. Its connotations are countless and can be listed at length.

These may be the first instances in the surrealists’ work where the female mouth appears in isolation, a way that later pop‑art would amplify: as a signifier of sensuality, sightlessness, freedom’s modern frivolousness. Simultaneously, the ever‑emerging advertising culture has turned the female mouth into one of the most dominant visual media, a spectacle. A second point of connection that comes up when looking at these works is a comparison with hyper‑realism: mainly Chuck Close’s painterly approach “dives in”. With Chuck Close the cold objectivity fractures the surface of the image, moving close to each of his works, the paint on the face’s texture falls apart almost atomically. Claudia is colourful, playful, lyrical – altogether cheery – even though this map‑like investigation is not unfamiliar to her either. From the elegy of playful sensuality and a cold investigative gaze emerges something from her that is strikingly contemporary, feminine, bold and emblematic. Her images sometimes evoke landscape associations; sometimes we feel as if we are looking into a crystal structure; sometimes as if we were wandering in a microscopic world of cells. The story does not end there. In the female Gulliver’s tale the tone shifts and the lilliputians appear as Kinder figurines. The toys found inside a Kinder egg, where assembly is pleasure, do not play well in the long term, so the objects of instant surprise – their symbols, in fact – reflect today’s child consumer behaviour – they belong to the bricolage that even very interests figures like Bandrillard in the Structure of Things. Claudia belongs to that generation whose childhood foundation has been literally the small assembly parts removed from a chocolate egg, correctly embedded in her painterly world.

The story still continues here today. Yet the self‑assembling birds that burst out of the Kinder egg are already chirping about some new shift in Claudia’s art. Let us not rush so far ahead.

Sure. Male painters often quote at great length the words of our master, Salvador Dali – the great hyper‑realist and pioneer of Kinder‑egg painting – when they come across women’s art. He himself declared, in a swaggering tone, that painting requires balls. All due respect is owed to one of the last great macho painters, yet it seems that good painting demands only a few kissy mouths and a handful of plastic figures. So, standing on our beards, we shrug our shoulders and, shamefully, slowly unfold our crossed arms. Thus appear the things Dali says are needed for painting.

Congratulations to the artist. I am opening the exhibition.