The series of graphic artist Győző Sárkány’s Trianon Anzix (Trianon Postcards) is linked to the 100th anniversary of the fateful historical event, which he commemorates with 100 black and white graphic sheets. The drama of the country’s shocking human and territorial loss is powerfully expressed by the dark and light rhythm of the juxtaposed compositions. The artist’s approach is not the usual narrative one; instead, he looks at the historical tragedy on a transnational, world-historical scale. This vision allows us to experience our own historical drama as an experience similar to the tragedies that have occurred countless times throughout human history, and in each drawing, he consciously blends together elements of the historical and the individual spheres, emphasising their inescapable interconnections.
It explores and displays the various contexts of personal and communal life feelings, from completely closed intimate expression to cosmic manifestations. Change, as a keyword, applies to both formal and semantic content. One of its adequate pictorial equivalents is the fight/battle/struggle, represented in most drawings by the helmeted warrior. The battle scenes are paraphrases of specific art-historical representations, while the intermingling of various lines, shapes and frames suggests a struggle. He does not, however, attempt explanations or interpretations, but poses questions in a flow of drawings that pulsates before our eyes, disciplined in its deliberation yet surrealistically free-flowing.
The motifs, symbols and emblems that appear in the compositions can sometimes be interpreted as concrete references, but in fact the 100 graphics are a single, coherent bundle of ideas explained in pictures, the interpretation of which requires active, in-depth participation from the audience.
Ildikó D. Udvary art historian
