By Dr. Mária Egri, Vasarely Museum Director, Museologist, and Art Historian
József Gábriel is an artist who is able to preserve the present moment for eternity. On the canvas he opens up new dimensions and worlds in which past and future can simultaneously be experienced. Past, present and future are melted into each other in Gabriel’s pictures giving the viewer the sense of being a time-traveler.
Talking about Gábriel’s art, his colour pencil drawings and his tint drawings must be mentioned too. His mastery of art seems to be testified by his colour etchings and his brushwork while his excellent drawing skill seems to be justified by the partly seen parts of body: hands, faces, eyes, turning and twisting torsos represented on his canvases. He puts as much effort into representing an animal’s head or wing as representing an old mill-wheel, rusty mechanism or gratings of a cage. The details of the represented objects or figures are sometimes easily recognized, sometimes they blur into the layers of paints drifting into the background so as to unite with other spots, lights and details and then to emerge in new forms. The constituents of Gábriel’s pictures are always in change verifying his theory of “incompleteness”: the painting, like life itself, is in a state of continuous change, and the moment, the details gain their significance not in themselves but in their interrelatedness through the changing process.
József Gábriel is shy and reserved. However, if he opens up, he expresses himself beautifully either in speech or in writing. He speaks to us either is rhyming lines or in crystallized arguments. He is able to condense his thoughts into a painting as well as into a few lines. The interpretation of the colours and forms of his pictures requires a poem while the reading of his poems calls new colours and forms. Inspired by a piece of music perhaps, he composes beautiful pictures.
József Gábriel’s newest pictures are considered to be a continuation of his older ones. They lead us deeper and further into the Planet Gábriel where we find ourselves in a world woven from the images of past and future and represented by exciting and strange colours and forms. If you let Gábriel’s pictures have an influence on you, they will give you several new perspectives. Responding to his pictures you may be able to answer your own so long unanswered questions too.
József Gábriel’s characteristics mode of expression is easily recognizable. He is faithful to representational painting. However, grasping his pictures in their fullness takes time. Looking at his paintings the figures, objects and details reveal themselves in a slow recognition process. They gradually emerged take their shapes from the colourful, subtle texture. His paintings, like the Self, are constituted through the interactions of the conscious and unconscious processes. His excellent sense of colour and form makes it possible for his pictures to evoke images associated with the senses of touch and smell. His paintings and monochrome graphics make an impression on our memories and provide us with a strange and exciting sense of deja vu. They present us with the illusion of the already lived, seen and experienced. The incomplete, hardly graspable forms and figures appear on the canvas interwoven with thick layers of paints and spots and then disappear again as suddenly appearing memories of seemingly recognized sweet smell, face, land or melody.