István Sinkó
In the Zone
The Strugatsky brothers were great sci-fi authors, however, their best known work has become world famous in another genre: the film. The Stalker and its creator, Tarkovsky have metamorphosed this sci-fi material, and propelled the viewers into magical distances – into the past and the future. It opened up dimensions, which the good screenplay writers perhaps did not even dare to hope for. By the way, the original title of the short novel is Roadside Picnic.
Those who arrived to the Zone had a picnic at the roadside, on a no man’s land, or perhaps no man’s branch just like the visitors of Judit Zirczi’s exhibition. The Zone is an abandoned, post-disaster landscape, which has preserved our past but is also the scenery of our future. A bleak scenery. A bleak future.
Zirczi attempts to delineate this double dreariness in the cold lights of colourful landscapes and the flashing of unexpectedly emerging elements.
A tent standing in a bleak landscape, blue flashing shapes, rosy panel buildings emerging from barren brown ochres.
Our reality awareness is put to the test by the images of the painter. Have we already seen these landscapes, structures, buildings in real life?
The answer comes immediately: yes! In our nightmares we wander at the border of land and water, splashing through the wet squalor that drains along the walls of the blue-gray concrete bunker. And if you enter this deserted space, guess who you’ll meet, your age- and time-worn double-ganger.
Judit Zirczi recently graduated from the painting faculty of the Hungarian University for Fine Arts, and she seems to have left her alma mater with a mature visual world. She had good recommenders for her life as a painter: her master József Gaál, who was responsive to the pressingly current issues in his student‘s pictorial art program, and the poet, writer and arts organizer Bálint Szombathy, who sensed the lyric behind the lean, visionary images.
Zirczi’s bold commitment to confronting us with the dream-like system of doomsday’s lights and colours – because her thinking is primarily based on the relations of colour and light -, has now found new directions. The camper, that is the human figure entered the picture. Its presence is still uncertain; sometimes its there, sometimes not. It shrinks away shyly among the visual elements like a staffage, however, on one of the works, in a puppet play-cavalcade made of paysagists, it becomes the main character – even though it is completely bleached.
On no man’s land, the painter is also just a nobody, a puppet, its colour is irrelevant. It brings a picture to the picnic as well. Pictures of trees and landscapes from the days of long-ago.
So that we know what was once the Lost, lost Paradise like.
The painting art of Judit Zirczi, however, is not depressing, nor unrealistic or sceptical. She flashes different attitudes towards life and makes us realize the potential hazards of her landscapes; all this by keeping her aesthetical and sensitive style, or even her fine lyricism. Therefore, her works are lovable and thought-evokingly harmonious.
So let us remember her visions. The Zone is all around us.
2012 September