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FORM AND SPACE

The exhibit opening tonight is a unique, festive event, for the artist Nagy Attila, the one who due to an unjustified modesty (but with a welcomed encouragement from the behalf of the colleagues) did not dare for some while to expose his works in the flash of a gallery’s spot but, most of all, of the visitor alike, due to the unusual combination of materials, for the sequence of the exhibits held in this space. Here, in the presence of a glass blower and his decorative art, he enters into the domain of rara avis.

            At Cluj, playing with all the four essential elements that nature gives us: earth, fire, air and water, at a very serious manner coordinated by professor Ailincăi, he receives at the end a degree with a label: potter-glass blower! In time, he adds another element: wood, and, in this evening, he displays what he did behind the curtains of this label during the last years. The curiosity is big: ours, of the guests, but, especially of the students that he gently teaches at the High School of Art: studies, volume, proportions, anatomy, modeling, etc., guiding them in order to form them as sculptors. Other degrees, other labels, new artists! So, returning: glass, wood, metal! Color, stains and …gold leafs! Mat, shiny, cut, sand blasted! Alternations! And empty, and full and rhythms. Structures! Obsessions! Wings, eyes and a spinning wheel! Even two and even more. Tensions and release! Recoveries, of materials, but also of symbols and then, restitutions. Of course that we have willingly simplified the endeavor. The process of creation is much denser, more intense and very personal. The combustions are not only in the ovens, but also combustions in the inside! The cut is made in the wood’s soft essence, clippings, sinuosity is obtained and then implants are made. The metal is fixed very genuinely and at all at sight, as a natural extension, glass is inserted, stains are laid on it and it is caressed in certain places with color. It is the “plastic surgery” of a lot of his works, in order to obtain a decorative esthetics as surprising as possible.

            But the true history of the birth of these works begins in a warehouse with objects gathered from the passion of a French character for our folk art and even for the everyday objects from villages, which have become curiosities for him. The character has changed, but their destiny has received another turn of events. The artist has intervened on the line of their destination. The linchpin, the wood bowl, the spinning wheel and other small utensils used by some prankster peasant, have never dreamt to having Attitudes, to rise an Icarus in an illusory flight towards the sky, to provoke Tensions to the matter, to start paradoxical Ineffable Dialogues, to let themselves be cu and polished, to allow indiscreet glimpses from behalf of some surreal glassy eyes! Nevertheless, the life in the village, with its cyclic repetition, with these humble tools, has its meaning. The same thing would also be said by the artist about his creations. And what if the light has interfered?  That he does not call it creation, but toil, that he calls it art and not craft. Because it is defined as it follows: “the spinning wheel is an installation for the processing of wool fibers operated with human force, though a pedal which, through an ax, engages another wheel which transmits the circular motion towards a horizontal ax (coil) on which the purred threads will be rolled.” And, from here, there is one step, granted, a major one, towards the Wheel for Spinning Time or The Wheel for Spinning Dreams or the Wheel of Time, which is the same for all of us. The threads of thoughts are processed, intertwined, and transformed in figments of the hands which are seriously coordinated (as I was saying at the beginning) by the mind “educated” for a long time from the exercise of the one who is creating. Also on a wheel, made of a glass funnel, as from an ancient record player, you can almost hear the music of the matter. The sensation is not only at a single work. The materials seem to be singing their fusions and merger, their tissues, textures and truncations, their colors and splicing. The linchpin visually pierces the atmosphere.

            And, since we are in a building with strong Art Nouveau resonances, which also borrows its name to the gallery, the artist, with subtle jeweler handcraft, places only on the works with a sensual

feminine coquetry, refined “petals” of colored glass dressed in leafs (not to say little skirts) of copper, worthy of Tiffany’s praise.

            We are leaving the register of the tactile challenges of the sinuosity with feminine pulsations. A piece of wood subjected to the devouring of tens of caries which are digging deep in the center, sucking and humiliating the fiber, degrading to the point of rottenness, is saved. It becomes the shelter of a sphere – a perfect rolling of the glass eye – and of a long tear which seems to be lamenting its ancient fate. Nonetheless, nothing spoils the decorative. 

            And, where he is only a glass creator, he blows, cuts, sands or not, and then he glues small pieces from the matter with echoes of sand and limestone, fantasizing the miniature forms which make you think about the fjords from far away. This road is incredible, from the incandescence of the fire, to the icy exterior of the final effect. And then, also with glass steps, he leads us into bituminous shadows. An orange colored dot intensifies the effect of chromatic contradictions.

Cora FODOR, Art Historian