Love, passion, eroticism…and yes, the spring. These are the keywords of Tibor Juhász’s exhibition performing his newest works. Good keywords, which can influence everybody, because love, passion and eroticism appears in lives of all of us- somehow.Then feelings and images get to the dark room of our souls, and there is the negative, in order to have the clear picture standing in front of us. What does the result mean to each of us? Tibor puts the hug on oil and canvas, shadowing the caught movement with warm colours. Catching the moment: that is the picture. And in the picture, there is also the poetry. When they ask me to open an exhibition, I always ask: why me? Why did the artist think about me? What can I add to his art, how can I help to understand it? This was a simple situation for me, because I am also talking about love, just with different tools. As I usually do, I did not use my own parts of poems, but asked for other poets í1s work, to translate the picture into words. Watching the paintings, I immediately started to think about a Rimbaud poem, please watch the paintings while I am reading it. As the text, the melody of the text and the picture would be created from the same material. Even if the title of the poem is : Jewellery, and on Tibor’s paintings there are just naked bodies moving, this is not a far association: an ornament of a body can also be the flexibility of one movement, the direction of a look, or even the partner’s hug...
Jewels by Charles Baudelaire
The darling one was naked, and knowing my wish,
Had kept only the regalia of her jewelry
Whose resonant charms can lure and vanquish
Like a Moorish slave-girl's in her moment of glory.
A world of dazzling stones and of precious metals
Flinging, in its quick rhythm, glints of mockery
Ravishes me into ecstasy, I love to madness
The mingling of sounds and lights in one intricacy.
Naked, then, she was to all of my worship,
Smiling in triumph from the heights of her couch
At my desire advancing, as gentle and deep
As the sea sending its waves to the warm beach.
Her eyes fixed as a tiger's in the tamer's trance,
Absent, unthinking, she varies her poses
With an audacity and wild innocence
That gave a strange pang to each metamorphosis.
Her long legs, her hips, shining smooth as oil,
Her arms and her thighs, undulant as a swan,
Lured my serene, clairvoyant gaze to travel
To her belly and breasts, the grapes of my vine.
With a charm as powerful as an evil angel
To trouble and calm where my soul had retreated,
They advanced slowly to dislodge it from its crystal
Rock, where its loneliness meditated.
With the hips of Antiope, the torso of a boy,
So deeply was the one form sprung into the other
It seemed as if desire had fashioned a new toy.
Her farded, fawn-brown skin was perfection to either !
--And the lamp having at last resigned itself to death,
There was nothing now but firelight in the room,
And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath
It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.
Blood, passion and intimacy: that is caught by Tibor Juhász. We can see parts of life of a couple, getting close to them, we are ont he bed, ont he couch, in the exact moment. I love his colours. They are warm, orange, warm blue, tired pink disappearing grey. As intimacy, paintings are also not too much, love is not always burning fire, not always red and black, love is calm and harmonic, and this harmony is showed in making love. As two bodies become one picture. One unit, belonging to each other. Pairs are dissolved in each other, in love. And now I have to show my favourite love poem. It is written by Géza Szőcs, the title is: Double sonette. It is about the same passion, expressed with the same colours.
[...]
I have never written an erotic poem, I miss the words for that yet, I miss the style, tone, which I could make it unique.I am still searching, trying to catch the most important part of love on physical and emotional level. And these kind of paintings can help me. Because they are simple and opened- and that is exactly what we need: honesty and simpleness. Pretending that we have no tools, although we already have everything for love. So with these words I am glad to open Tibor Juhász’s exhibition, I hope a lot of us will think about the fact that we are made from love, and love is not else than the greatest gift in our lives.
Orsolya Karafiáth - poet
© 2011 Juhász Tibor