István Ladányi’s Opening Remarks. Delivered at the opening of István Szajkó’s exhibition at the Sümegi Violin Workshop and Gallery, run by Elemér Sümegi, in Veszprém, on April 29, 2026

Distinguished Guests, dear Friends, admirers of István Szajkó’s art!

I shall begin with a cheerful phrase, like the circus barkers of old: only here, only now, only for you! — and let me add: only for Elemér’s sake.

I am delighted about this exhibition — and that is where my delight ends. Opening an exhibition of István Szajkó without István Szajkó himself present is a burden not quite tailored to me. Elemér and I agreed that I would not say anything personal, and I hope I can keep to that. And, indeed, keep myself together at all.

I shall speak about István Szajkó’s paintings, above all about why I love them.

I love them because they are trustworthy and beautiful.

I know, I see that they are trustworthy — that is, worthy of the time I spend with them, worthy of contemplation — because I can see that their creator knows his craft, knows what he is doing, why, and how. I see that he possesses a distinct, carefully considered, fully developed, sovereign visual world. And this visual world grew organically together with the chosen, discovered, and matured technique; with the selected motifs of an artist living in the world and observing it artistically; and with a visual language that is recognizable even apart from these elements, yet inseparable from them.

Technique, motifs, visual language. The order is, in truth, arbitrary.

These are three things, because such triadic divisions are useful, and because it is easier to speak about them than about fidelity, commitment, artistic responsibility, consistency — that is, about those qualities that hold together and animate the three things just mentioned: the motifs, the artistic technique, and the visual language.

Szajkó was a born talent, an absolute artistic talent, and he received the finest education, one that transmitted tradition to him while also encouraging and inspiring innovation, the free and courageous formation of his own artistic world.

He came from the end of the world (and the world has many ends), from a small northwestern Bačka village called Csonoplya, from a peasant milieu. Recognizing and supporting his talent, his family and teachers helped him advance first to the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Novi Sad, where he graduated in graphic arts, and then to the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he studied painting.

His master in Zagreb, the Croatian painter Nikola Reiser, was himself part of a great tradition: he carried forward the legacy of Croatian and French modernism, including the ethos of artistic freedom and freedom itself. Perhaps it is not insignificant that Reiser, born in 1918, interrupted his academic studies for several years as a young man to join the Yugoslav partisan movement. Yet he did not become a painter of political movements; his work is most often characterized as intimist. Nikola Reiser formulated his artistic motto thus: “I loved beautiful things, and those are what I painted.” (“Volio sam lijepe stvari i njih sam slikao.”)

Szajkó’s secondary-school years fell in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his university years in the middle of that decade; he graduated in 1978. These were fantastic years in Yugoslav art: by then, the experiments of late modernism and the neo-avant-garde had largely matured, the momentum still endured, and the crisis and disintegration of that world were still far away. His early career, both at the Academy and in the years immediately following, unfolded beautifully: the promising talent became an acknowledged painter, with exhibitions, commissions, buyers, and professional acclaim. And this benefited him — it strengthened his ambition, his courage, his appetite for work. This splendid beginning, the knowledge he acquired, and the self-respect formed during those years sustained him later, through more difficult times.

Artistic technique, visual language, motifs.

Szajkó understood the art of the line — whether drawn in ink, pencil, or anything else. He mastered the techniques of painting with oil on canvas, tempera on hardboard, anything upon anything. He was a magnificent watercolorist and loved watercolor, yet increasingly pastel became his true medium: there the lines may vary from sharp to blurred; there the traces of chalk can be blended, softened, diffused by hand, sponge, or cloth; there delicate, tender, naturally receptive backgrounds may be formed around firmly drawn motifs. And he loved, and fully exploited, the silky, subtle, opalescent matte surface that could thus be achieved.

For a long time he varied the compositions of his paintings until he arrived at that visual world poised between figuration and abstraction — unmistakably figurative and inevitably abstract at once — a world that dispenses with precise, richly detailed backgrounds and realistic environments, creating instead an imaginary pictorial space that may, as needed, be beautiful, raw, threatening, harsh, soft, strident, dense, yet never realistic; its reality is always painterly. At the edges of the canvas it always thins out, dissolves, and beyond its borders there is nothingness. And into the center of this space, or into the point of the golden section, or scattered throughout it, he places his chosen motifs: he elevates them, illuminates them, sets them ablaze.

He found his motifs — motifs that were his own and at the same time signs of fidelity to the world from which he emerged: gates and doors; the Vojvodinian men in hats and flat caps; the magpie and the doves; the seaside pier; the girls and women. And above all, the bicycle — bicycles everywhere and anywhere, with men in hats and caps, women in skirts and jeans, bicycles parked before repair shops — and let us not forget János Szárits, the brilliant Subotica clerk and mechanic, racing cyclist and builder of self-designed airplanes.

Szajkó could draw a bicycle at any moment, even if awakened from the deepest sleep — indeed, probably even in his dreams — tracing the circles of the wheels with an unfaltering hand, casually, one-handedly, impossibly well. He drew movement itself onto the picture: the movement of his own hand and that of the bicycle, the absurd marvel that is the bicycle, and the human being who invents this two-wheeled wonder, this “iron horse,” then mounts it and pedals away. Everything is there in it: the dusty Bačka country road, the milk cans and mesh shopping bags hanging from the handlebars, the townspeople pedaling to work, the racing cyclists bent over their machines and leaning into curves. Seen from here, it is at once traditional and modern. And there is also the contingency, the beauty, the delight, and the sadness of all this. That the bicycle keeps moving only as long as there is someone to pedal it.

The paintings, however, remain here.

Thank you for listening.