This call of the past, this echo of myth, is out in the open, plain to see, in a lot of Hungarian figurative art - as well as music and poetry. Looking for it in abstract paintings may sound perverse.
But so much is left out when an artist abandons images, often the underlying message can come through more clearly, with less distraction.
Anyone can see that Sperling is searching for something; scratching, exposing, obsessively cutting away, the way Giacometti did, trying somehow to purify, distil, explain something he can see right there in front of his eyes.
Or perhaps, right here.
Left - a photograph
by Sperling of a boarded-up shop in London;
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Perhaps Hungary's Great Plain is where the East really begins - where Europe gives way to the Asian steppes, an ancient vastness of uplands sparsely dotted with nomadic tribes such as the Avars, the Huns, the Mongols - a place many nostalgic Hungarians, still, after a thousand years on the edge of Europe, half-seriously call home.
Centre - material: charcoal and rust dots on paper; |
What exactly are they - and the others who come here - yearning for?
A time before Christianity? A time before cities? A time before magic lost its power?
Centre photograph by Hungarian fashion photographer
Péter Richweisz for a magazine spread depicting Robin Sperling as Alistair Crowley,
the infamous English pre-war magician and misanthrope, flanked by two black-and-white
abstracts of Sperling's, both titled 'Puszta frottage'
