ART REVIEWS
GIUSEPPE MARCHIORI
1978
In the sculptures of François Kovacs, the first basis of artistic inspiration is scientific research, which resulted in complex exchanges in a long series of lucid works, which the author himself qualified as “organic”. What they are, in truth, because they are modeled on the observation under the microscope of human, animal and plant tissues.
This is a brilliant discovery, which allows artistic expression to be achieved after having penetrated the morphology of natural structures under the microscope. These thus become valid structures in architecture as well as in painting and sculpture. This is an expression specific to our experimental century. Kovacs realized this with admirable intuition, especially in his “Hommage à Gaudi”, which can be considered as a convincing example of the close relationship established between the microscopic analysis of a honeycomb tissue and the model of a baroque and visionary plastic, characteristic of the style and the fertile imagination of the Catalan architect. The first time I had the opportunity to see some of Kovacs' works, I was indeed struck by the extraordinary mobility of forms, animated by an irresistible vitality, by a dynamism which manifests itself in irruptive twists, point, for example, of transforming a column into a set of contorted stylistic elements, in which the plastic unity would fragment into a daring baroque stylistic framework.
Thus, faced with the difficult problem he had posed, Kovacs had already reached in his first sculptures a well-determined choice, that of the integration of “organic” sculpture in a cultural plan removed from scientific observation. and postponed - a new solution - in the original order of plastic art. These works were undoubtedly of an original quality in their free interpretation of an unknown world and that only the microscope had been able to reveal, in a strange baroque transposition. Kovacs had used the magical effects of the bronze casting of his sculptures, animated by a rhythm accentuated by the golden reflections of the metal. But it was then necessary to oppose to the fascination which emanates from bronze the possibility of a metamorphosis of the elements themselves, through the black and white painting, which could make of them real “totems”, which one could attribute to the one or the other distant African or Polynesian civilization.
It goes without saying that the materials are also varied: painted aluminum and marble, always in white and black, since polychrome sculpture does not lend itself at all to the “constructivist” design, which is essential with structural rigor. absolute for white Carrara marble and Belgian black marble, which Kovacs would later use to achieve perfect architectural harmonies, which he symbolically qualified as “cosmic”, a seductive term if there was one.
These figures include the circle, the center, the cross and the square, which correspond, in order, to the macrocosm opposed to the microcosm, to the microcosm or living being, to the encounter and to the union, represented as communication in the sculpture, and the four fundamental elements: earth, fire, air and water. The concave and the convex, which symbolize woman and man, also come into consideration, says Kovacs. And they could be reduced to the characteristics of “organic” art, surpassed however by the new conceptions which completely modify the art of Kovacs, opening in a certain way the way - beyond all symbolic interpretations - to a renovated sculpture, based exclusively on the infinite combinations of “modules”. The temptation of color, which ancient sculptors often used, led Kovacs to a series of research, which resulted in the application of certain principles inspired by the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, which is based on two opposing symbols, the Yin and Yang, to explain the Universe, God, reality, the essence of human and cosmic life.
The “white” prevails over the different colors and even over the black, notwithstanding the Taoist meaning that Kovacs wanted to give to this fundamental contrast. To conclude, this phase of Kovacs' art, which goes back to the origins, can be explained by the spiraled marble columns, of an absolute formal preciousness, made possible by the quality of the material.
The white Carrara marble lends itself, in fact, to this modulated finesse, to these polished curves with a subtle, almost musical grace, if it is permissible to use a somewhat ambiguous term, but valid to define the extreme spirituality of these forms, which enclose the sense of the infinite in their exact dimension and which approach, through the identity of the ends, the absolute purity of the forms dear to Brancusi.
The primordial forms in Kovacs' art assume a more complex and revealing symbolism, as in the typical cases of “Birth of a cube in the cosmic egg” and “Birth of a cube within. the sphere".
It is difficult to take into account all the stages which constitute the ideal reasons for a formal process so rich in symbolic meanings. It is difficult to reconstruct this succession of moments, linked to one another, according to the scheme of a rigorously logical thought, which manifests itself in the continuity of plastic expressions, from the achievements of the “organic” period.
We thus arrive at the current period, the third, which the sculptor precisely defines as that of “infinite modulation”, in the sense that it is inspired by the infinity of possible combinations of the “polyvalent module”.
I have under my eyes, on my work table, the small marble model which represents the current synthesis of a long work, which has unfolded over time to arrive at the conclusion of a projected constructivist experience, with the presence and participation of the public, who will be able to observe the extraordinary variety of possible combinations. The project is fascinating in that it allows the validity of the multipurpose module to be verified.
The program of this artistic event, which the sculptor considers as important as those of Kassel and Venice, is outlined in a text entitled “Conceptual sculpture with the participation of the public”. However, it is not a question of one of these current “performances”, but of an experiment where the module is represented by a “section of a cube produced according to constructivist rules and which itself has an aesthetic value”. Kovacs claims that two copies of this module can create some 144 variations. We take his word for it. In this way, the sculpture, already aesthetically valid in the single copy, can multiply ad infinitum and give the public the satisfaction of “creating”, by means of the multiple offered by the artist with devilish ability.
Kovacs arrived from science to art through a largely experimental process, which shows how rational research can boldly cross its own limits and justify itself in creative fantasy, expressing new core values of absolute aesthetic purity. All the work of François Kovacs, which I have tried to analyze in the different aspects of its evolution, must be considered, in the history of modern European sculpture, as an example of a singular artistic vocation.
The art of F. Kovacs reveals, indeed, a nature of a particularly gifted artist who manages to achieve fantastic inspiration in absolute ways with a genius constructive capacity. A quality, this one absolutely rare in an artist of our time.
PIERRE BAUDSON
1978
The assembly of prefabricated elements or those provided by chance is a form of play which characterizes and pursues man from his childhood.
Towers raised as if by challenge, endlessly renewed labyrinths, constructions with always unexpected interweaving follow one another like so many obsessions, often escaping the realm of consciousness and reflection.
The sculptor cannot escape this “game”. Confronted with the traps that an insistent, penetrating, devouring, intoxicating space sets for him, he can only dream incessantly of integrating it into his creations, letting his light play in them, as the whole contemporary problematic of his art pushes him to do. For a long time, he discovered that his work can no longer be an entity reduced to itself, isolated in its surrounding environment, but that it must, on the contrary, conquer it, dialogue with it, take possession of it. This attitude necessarily implies an original use of masses and voids, colors and materials, whatever the scale or the character of the work: signal dominating its environment or structure directly participating in it. Among the major currents of contemporary sculpture, the rhythmic repetition, and as it were naturally ordered, of the same element, of a predefined module, is one of those which give rise to strict, rigorous organizations but not devoid of poetic spirit, even a precise symbolism.
It is there, at the current stage of an evolution which will have led him very logically from cellular structures, in the biological sense of the term, to the quasi-mathematical organization of space, that François Kovacs seems to be located very exactly. in its implementation of a “multipurpose module”.
“My problem,” wrote Marino Di Teana, “is to create an evolving structure, that is to say never finished. These forms which I call evolutionary are presented in such a way that, when I design these structures, they can be a jewel as well as an interior subject or a colossal structure for the external environment, and, developed, they can to become a city to shelter people, without losing their artistic character ”.
At the level of integration - magic word of contemporary artistic creation - and in a more systematic sense - but should we beware of it? - this is undoubtedly what Kovacs is aiming for through the surprisingly varied implementation of its modules. Multiplying these in three dimensions, he responds to this fundamental and eternal need: to create, in the words of another sculptor, Berto Lardera, “plastic situations”.
His works, signals or environments, prove to be developable in space, playing on emptiness and fullness, light and shadow, smallness and grandeur. Born from a single original element, whatever the color, the material, the size, they translate an active intellectual speculation on the possibilities of fusion between sculpture and architecture, the sculptural module joins the architectonic element in a dialogue whose fantasy is not excluded. This, according to the combinations, will give birth either to large ambulatory organizations, real playful places, theatrical “residences” with determined social functions, or to superimpositions of porticos habitable by the sole gaze of dreamlike arcades, to the necessary gratuity, or endless columns, spiritual daughters of Brancusi.
But the same components, multiple-modules, bending to the architect's more functional laws and adapting to the necessarily more utilitarian and everyday character of his constructions, could also provide a sort of visual echo to purely sculptural proposals.
From then on, the inevitable and eternal quest, which so often sees the space-hungry creator coming and going from sculpture to architecture, will be reaffirmed once again, in broad daylight.
BERNARD DE MELLO
1982
“Arts, Antiques, Auctions”
In the opinion of even the most outstanding artists, Kandinsky, Pevsner, Malévitch, the purest patterns of their works were first inspired by the icons that their stripped vision then set out on the path of the absolute and the mystical. . Because constructivism, contrary to a widespread misconception, never presented itself, at the great moments of its achievements, as the nihilist ax of emotional, playful art, where the revolution of 1917, after the twenties, s t is easy to drown the artistic phenomenon.
Gabo was not mistaken, he who wrote in 1920: “I believe that art has a real part in the social and mental chain of human life. I believe that art is the most immediate and effective means of communication between members of human society. I believe that art having a supreme vitality equal to that of life itself reigns over all human creations ”.
FlKovacs shares this conviction and shares it with us through his sculpted work. As G. Marchiori did not fail to point out, about the role that geometric symbolism plays in the artist's work. A tireless researcher, FlKovacs has recently focused his creations on the skilfully ordered repetition of the pre-established module from which he builds rigorous constructions, although imprinted with a mathematical poetry, where the eye, taking over the function of touch, advances, figure after figure, in a progressive taking possession of what the work was born. Jewelry made only as a single piece, signed and testifying to a remarkable technical execution. These use exclusively yellow gold that the artist manages to metamorphose, with great finesse, into a texture of infinite nuances.
ACHILLE SAMOY
1998
We hesitate between admiration for his desire for change or the discovery of new horizons, supported by a sure technique, mastering the material: bronze, paint, wood, Carrara marble, new chemical techniques and even more his conceptual projects. The discoveries are often astonishing. It is hardly surprising that he loves music, especially the classics.
Throughout all his periods, FI Kovacs has always wanted to mark the dominant silhouette of the column in his works. These different aspects of columns would characterize for the artist the unconscious symbolization of man. The “Counterpoint” would be one of the perspectives of man seen through one of his passions: music. Indeed, the modeling of the releasing matter are equal perfect in the air is closely mixed with the space. The air thus modeled then offers us as many rhythmic meanings as the sculpture itself. This three-dimensional artistic achievement by FI Kovacs reveals to us the perfect harmony that can exist between man and music.
LUIGI MORMINO
1998
Once upon a time there was perfection. Science rising to rarefied levels of art. Art dressing in turn with microscopic or macrophotographic observations, with Chinese Taoist philosophy, becoming stripped down and minimal, reaching the solitary heights of counterpoint, seeking modularity, venturing into the figurative only to find or even defying the human limits of the gesture to capture the radiance of the bloody color of expressionism or the elegance of oriental writing. These few words, very poor, to describe an artist's life, a long artist's life, that of François I. Kovacs beginning in his native Hungary at the end of the 1930s and continuing, by stony paths, in his adopted homeland, Belgium, since 1956.
I have often wondered how to speak of a painting, of a sculpture; the lyrics have their own dimension, their weight. It is difficult to adjust, dress, knead them, to make baskets of beautiful phrases to use on any occasion. The brave writer must therefore shape them into “keys”, leave the readers traces to follow (we are all “Little Thumbs” “badly grown up”) so that the discovery is a joy, a fragment of sky stolen from the azure of the days. bland and insignificant. So let's try to measure ourselves against the art of François I. Kovacs and to find together the corridors which will bring us into the secret world of this artist with the powerful creative capacity.
First keyword: science
“Whoever accumulates science accumulates suffering”. Kovacs is a man of science, an eminent doctor who, throughout his life, “reconstructed” what the accident of violence had destroyed or disfigured in his patients. His silversmith's hands, his mania for a balance between lines and volumes, his taste for the extreme research of human, zoological and plant tissues, will produce, as soon as the urgency of expression becomes imperative, the “organic” ones. (sculptures and paintings) and will plunge the artist into the irreversible world of art, this sweet prison from which not even death is capable of freeing us. ... “This machine made up of bones and flesh” (Descartes) that is the human body is neither a “skeleton, nor a skinned” (Th. Gautier), but a vast field of research : the complex structure of his flesh, of his organs, fascinate and capture the devouring imagination of the artist who makes it the world of his dreams and recomposes the alveolar intrigues in a static but permanent material (bronze or marble). Man takes the place of nature (or of God: “this is my body” says Jesus of bread) to freeze forever the marvelous creation of living and perishable matter. Others have done it with Kovacs, stopping the curve of time (and beauty) in the immortality of the image: Greek Venus, Michelangelo, Cranach, Botticelli, etc ...: “Oh man, modeler or sculptor, can you give yourself whatever shape you like ”(Pic de la Mirandole).
Second key word: music After a certain number of Manichean experiences in the encounter of black and white from which are born his powerful KOANON, idols-pillar of incredible formal perfection, Kovacs lives the experience of music. Jean Sébastien Bach and his supreme law of the exponential functions of sound absorb it in the volutes of the harmony which is none other than the order of the universe and bring it to the “Homage” to the great composer, the centerpiece of the work of Kovacs which reaches the absolute even if the artist does not resist the temptation to chant it in 24,576 possible combinations, starting from four different pieces, A quartet with evocative and descriptive symbolic intentions and very simple grammatical modes . A phrasing of four eighth notes to compose and decompose according to moods and angles of view. As in an infinite game wanting to prove human imperfection, the fallibility of the spirit in relation to the Celestial Architect whose music is the expression of his perfection. Third keyword: the module
The prodroms of the “organic” experience and of the “musical” approach contribute to exasperating in KOVACS its mathematical rigor, its natural vocation to construction, its incompressible mania for order. Modularity is born on hints of constructivism based on repetitive and variant shapes of the cube, a perfect geometric figure if there is one! Marble, wood, bronze form iterative and playful compositions that challenge and capture space. Kovacs rediscovers the monumental dimension of his beginnings; the assembly of the modules and their interchangeability remind the artist of the “card houses” of Hungarian childhood, made up of few things and big dreams. The modular order will accompany Kovacs, like a Stations of the Cross to the present day, although the man of science has meanwhile been touching expressionist, then figurative painting, finally appeasing signs of other eastern civilizations. ideograms assure him a “permanence of images”, a “duration of creation” which is the great reason of his life. Fourth keyword: loneliness
“The night has not yet arrived, but the sky is already cold”, said Pessoa in a poem, giving the silence that rules our life one of the deepest definitions. Man plows time, multiplies the seasons, runs after his phantasies and dreams, causes rain, sows the wind, harvests the storm, loves, is born, adulates sadness, causes happiness, “embrace the dawn of summer ”(Baudelaire) knowing that the night (the last) is there, at the corner of any day, at the mercy of a gray cloud or a peony sun. If “the sky is already cold” the great prayer that has been our life announces surrender. Each of us is aware of this. Kovacs lived by combining art and life. The osmosis between these two expressions was total, without girl or hesitation. The “state of panic” that he claimed when it was created is the obvious proof of the challenge he launched at too short a time, always too short, which marks an existence between two dates. The anguish “which succeeds in fading the freshness of the face but not that of the soul” (Shakespeare, the winter tale, act IV), was his lady-in-waiting, his dismal mistress, however, bringing him that grandeur that only solitude consecrates. That of the artist who will conquer time and night
WIM TOEBOSCH
2005
AICA
It has often been observed that physicians manifest - no doubt as a derivative of their functions - a deep interest in the arts. It is rarer, however, that a doctor who has done extensive research into the microscopic structures of human bones turns to the practice of sculpture. It must be said that chance (fate?) Had given the young Kovacs, in his native Hungary, the opportunity, from his sixteenth year, to learn the foundations by performing, alongside his brother, funerary monuments. But during his later studies it was the intriguing complexity of human and plant tissues that fascinated him and pushed him to engage in a kind of caving of the entanglement of corridors, alveoli and walls revealed by the microscope.
When he transposes the images he discovers into sculptures, he gives them the shape of an open labyrinth, as mysterious and confusing as those imagined by Greek mythology. He began by making monumental masses of them which he later dismembered into what he called 'polyvalent modules'. But, on a smaller scale, he also composes sections of spinal columns jagged into bumps and hollows that he paints in the style of Dubuffet's works, in a form of art brut with an anatomical basis.
Soon these forms, which are paradoxically figurative since they conform to a secret reality, are refined, simplified, geometrized and when the artist discovers the virtues and possibilities of white Carrara marble and black Mazy marble, his work evolves. towards a minimalist art up to the suprematism dear to Jawlensky. He glues alternate slices in totally abstract volumes, of an astonishing purity in their polished presence, uniting the extremes of the two non-colors, white and black in curves of an elegance without dryness, marrying contrasts and making it complementary. Abandoning his exploration of the caves of our skeleton, he lets himself be seduced by the smooth sweetness of imaginary fruits.
Sometimes he displays a predilection for the cube of which he cuts and hollows out the mass and the faces, breaking them down to recompose them as he pleases, juggling the void and the full, deceiving the gaze which creeps in and immediately wanders off. We find these characteristics - penetration and diversion, invitation to exploration and the pleasure of blurring the lines - in his large drawings which are reminiscent of the irritating but fascinating compositions of Escher. Here, Kovacs is fond of twists and breaking perspectives, the transition games of the Moebius ring, the realization of both undulations and rectilinear sections.
The work of François Kovacs is that of a researcher in several disciplines: as a man of science, he probes and ventures into the mystery of our bone structure; as a sculptor and even as a designer, he invests the space of our environment with forms and volumes which materialize the lines of force of our physical and sensory constitution.