tibor egyed: contemporary visual artist

The original work was completed in 1988, in the last year of the Ceausescu regime. At the height of the of isolation, longing and resignation it seemed that I would have to live my life in the neverending terror and loss of liberties. These feelings were exacerbated by the fact that I had to live through all of this as part of the Hungarian minority in Romania.
This assemblage wasn’t meant to be a simple self-portrait. It was a creed, an attempt of spiritual, moral, artistic, and human self-definition. I would call it a post-dadaist work.
The background is my burlap flag painting, then in front of it I stretched out my artist smock on a yellow Saint John cross. On top of it all I applied my self-portrait drawing, a photo-collage made of school pictures I had taken, and my handwritten love letter. I assembled all this under glass as a picture, then put it all behind an iron grid made of wires I had found at a construction site. Recently I came across this old work and I felt that it still represented me so well that I decided to reproduce of it. While doing so it ended up being much more than a reproduction, it became a whole new work of art.
I decided to document it more seriously. I had the idea to take pictures of it the same way a satellite takes pictures of Earth, piece by piece. In a similar fashion, using a small digital camera, I started taking photos. I didn’t want to use any mathematical instruments, I wanted to rely simply on my eyes and my body to measure things, since I wanted the new work to be born from the subjectivity of the human eye and the movements of the human body.
Originally I thought about just simply putting all the photos together and be done with the reproduction. But seeing the results of my digital pictures I couldn’t simply just do that, so a new work was born. I realized that documenting an old work led to a new idea, a new point of view. The new idea is built on the correlation between the parts and the whole. A new conflict appeared, but I also found an answer for it. This is more of a matter of viewpoint, than existentialism. Things exist regardless of any viewpoint. I realized that what I was trying to do here was very close to Krisnamurti’s theory. Realizing the destructive force of the conflict arised from division of “one”, he contradicts Plato, saying that “one” is “whole” and this whole is the infinite impossible to comprehend, though mankind still has the ability to understand it.
I placed the photographs representing pieces of the work in their original form and size, like a puzzle. In spite of the simplicity of this process a complex work was born. The correlation between the view and the visual content is perfect in its own imperfection. It gives the illusion of deepness and space.
I felt the need to explain the birth of this work in such detail to point out that it is not a deconstruction, but rather an attempt to restauration or documentation of some kind. The result itself is seen on the picture, but its deeper meaning is comprehensible beyond that. The thought and message expressed in this work still defines me. It is me.

E. T., Phoenix, 2010
translated in English by
Fromm Emese Réka