Szabadi Judit

The Nude as a Sign of Existence

A segment of the lifework of a painter on the zenith of his career is presented to us. It appears
to be about a single theme, or to repeat maniacally something which is none other than the
naked female body. To be more precise: the naked female body and space, the background.
The very moment one realizes that space is just as important as the nude - since the nude can
only be what, and who, it is in that very space - one must also admit that Gábor Lajta, who
never ceases to paint nudes, keeps confronting us coolly and objectively yet painfully with
our own age even though with the choice of his motifs he remains embedded in classical art
and, one may venture to say, he champions figurativity, clarity and even beauty (not in the
renaissance sense of the word, of course). Or, one may rather say, he confronts us with the
existential situation of today's man, with contemporary human existence. This he does so
gently that for a while one just has a good time among his pictures since the tight youthful
flesh, the pointed breasts, light-soaked faces, the warm nests of half-covered laps and the
iridescence of the background greys, clay-colours, lilacs and pinks are at first just delighting,
before leading to a pleasant languishment as if all was perfectly well.
It's however beyond doubt that these nudes are no descendants of Ingres' or Renoir's nudes
which were conceived for representation and even more for a joy of life, with their nacreous
skins, soft curves and every inch of their enticing bodies wading in the hotbed of lust and
eroticism. Gábor Lajta's nudes are more closely related to Cézanne's bathers in the sense that
a nude is more and at the same time less than itself. With Cézanne, the nude was a part of
nature, a bit of a still-life and measure, the indifferent building block of composition, hence
impersonal as are the trees, the sea bays or a stone-slide, or, for that matter, a few quinces on
a table-cloth with an upward turning fold.
In Gábor Lajta's pictures, the woman is no part of nature, as it is also uncertain whether
she belongs to anything or anyone at all; or, more precisely, she seems to belong only to
herself in her helplessness, in a huge, almost barren space. And even if the life-size nudes
refuse to become still-lives - they are namely more lifelike -, as captives of their pointless
gestures amidst the walls emanating the void, the nothingness, their appeal as women
becomes boresome and their presence gets filled with a metaphysical meaning in refutation of
sensuality and matter.
Torn from the world, they do nothing but accept their fate now impassively, now nearly
sadly - or, to put it in another way, they simply are. Though they have tiny gestures: sitting on
the ground, they wipe their eyes (Nude with a black coat), kneel (Back of a nude with
blanket), bend (Bending woman behind a folding-screen) or lean against a wash-stand (Nude
with a wash-stand), squat (Squatting woman with a water glass), or they cling to a metal
ladder (Two figures under a ladder) or rest an arm wrapped in cambric on a knee and this arm
floats in space like the fluttering wing of an ensnared bird (Woman with a wrapped arm), but
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"adorned" with useless gestures, they practically remain impersonal and abstract in their
inaction. Gábor Lajta evokes the extrasensory via the body, the immaterial via matter.
This transsubstantiation is the more fascinating as Gábor Lajta is a realistic and sensual
painter who renders the material - the terracotta bodies, a shoulder-blade almost piercing the
skin and the vertebrae, the enamel of a wash basin, the softness of linen, the metallic quality
of the ladder, the shiny lubricity of a raincoat's unfriendly plastic, the texture of a pair of
tights and the finely creased softness of the white cambric wrapping the arm - palpable with
utter subtlety and fondness. The same applies to the breathing backgrounds, the fluffy
brushstrokes and colour streams of the walls.
There are a few works, however, in which the metaphysical afflatus is more or less pushed
aside by a more direct representation of life. The fact itself that a figure is not alone directs
attention to their interrelation, suggesting a socialized life situation. This applies to one of his
most suggestive pictures, the Dance hall, where in the background a woman is doing the
splits with her chest bent forward. She is a faceless and ageless figure in the crude light
falling on her from the skylight - an unpleasant sight. Her taut body becomes meaningful as a
contrast to the figure of the young girl leaning casually against the column - what exactly
lends the picture its tense appeal is the contrast between crampiness and languishment. The
young girl sitting in the foreground wears a T-shirt, green trousers and boots, and smokes
pensively.
Covered heads and Woman and a man looking in a mirror may be a step further towards
sensuous reality. In one, a man and a woman squat side by side, but the overlappings and the
seeming entranglement of limbs throw them in a hard-to-define relationship. The same takes
place in the composition further compounded with the addition of the mirror, in which the
overlappings, the bodies and their shadows all imply something undecipherable despite all
their lifelike qualities, something that defies definition and penetration, that makes you
uneasy: the secret, which envelops the scene in the aura of poetry.
The originality of Gábor Lajta's painting derives from the tension between realism and an
ostensible lack of meaning. Earlier, this realism was stone-hard, crystalline and elaborated in
minute detail. By now, it has become more sweeping, with a more spontaneous brushwork;
its realism is not blunted but more pictorial - that is, the form contents are more eloquent. (It
suffices to think of the Lamp-cord, an ordinary and simple motif one could hardly find a
match for, in which the painterly facture has an autonomous meaning with the subsiding
surface of greys and browns, the soft light of the white bulging cloth and the tufty
brushstrokes on a reddish brown ground.)
Twelve pictures painted with a single impetus, a single breath - and they are homogeneous
even though they foreshadow a turn in the career - not only mark an important station but
also constitute an elevation from where the artist can look back freely upon the spiritual
grooves left behind. It's no wonder that the self-portrait of Gábor Lajta demands a place next
to the brooding or languid nudes - by way of a confrontation with reality and the work. It is
reckoning and measuring, a journey in one's self and a slightly dreamy astonishment at seeing
what broke away from him so organically in a few months' time. Where he used to set his
models earlier, now he set himself in front of the grey wall, frontally. In the pale subtly
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intellectual face, in the black glow of the eyes something flares up that only smouldered
suppressed in the melancholy-wrapped nudes: the soul.
May 31, 1999, Budapest

Gábor Lajta
1955 born in Budapest on September 28
1976-81 studied law at Budapest's ELTE University
1987-88 attended the Academy of Craft and Design in Vienna
1990-92 studied anatomic drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest
Member of the Association of Hungarian Artists and Society of Painters.
Lives and works in Budapest.