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Hungarian graphic arts is alive and kicking in the present day; it has young talented artists and believers, including Győző Sárkány. “In the first stage of my preparation, I was influenced by surrealism…”, he said in an interview in the magazine Mozgó Világ (“Moving World”). I would add that he still lives and works in the regions of a surrealism of many degrees. To use a literary category metaphor, I would call his orientation a unique and transcendental micro-realism, as he possesses a hyper-realistic level of drawing expertise and an extraordinary skill of apperception. His calm, objective way of presentation is neo-symbolist in content, his allegories are quite open, and he knows and uses the vocabulary of the language of concept art.

His subject matter is not broad: nature, nostalgia – with restraint – flora, art history and humanities. Considering nature, he loves the bare trees, bushes and dry twigs in winter, not only because of their more visible structure, but also because of their intellectual content. His way of presentation (for him, the ‘how’ is almost the most important aspect) is predominantly pointillage, the heritage of this 18th century copper engraving process; sometimes dense in facture and texture, sometimes dominated by omission, perhaps under the pretext of a snow-covered field. He also makes use of the structure of the montage and the collage, that is to say, he cuts his subject to pieces in order to juxtapose so far unrelated elements according to his own laws, creating new harmonies.

Sárkány is far removed from Kondor and his artistic environment, and expressiveness is more distant to him than anything else; furthermore, his temperament would not be suited to this formal language, either. Just as we know what a differential diagnosis is in medicine, we do not need to look for a circle of related aspirations in his case, but to see what makes him different from others. It is how deep he goes, how his primary sensitivity goes hand in hand with his cold-bloodedness. We should pay attention to his characteristic mark and that it is uniquely his – a signature that cannot be confused with that of others.

János Frank art historian