Compass I
2008
Etching                                              

Istvan Molnar Iscsu                      
Residence: Budapest, Hungary
Birthplace: Salgotarjan, Hungary

István Molnár Iscsu is a prolific graphic & book artist born in Salgotarjan, Hungary, in 1947.

István Molnár [Iscsu] has a meditative make-up. He does not argue but steps aside and wipes off the dust—to quote the poet János Arany, which, however, does not mean a lack of distinct views of things. He has a peculiar faculty of seeing the whole and the motleyed regimen of the constituting individuals of the whole. There are hardly persons in contemporary Hungarian graphic art [the names of Kamilla Szij and Istán Zsankó may perhaps be mentioned] who areable to design in such perspectives, on such a scale.

‘Design, my foot!’ To model, to monitor the process of great radius and many components, to plot the curves of functions with uncertain variables, to give the analysis of equations with many unknown. His theme is the greatest possible theme: the infinite, multiplication, the hardly perceivable curves of space and time; on the other side, he is intrigued by the questions of faith, morals, order and compromise, freedom, and subjection. The fundamental premises of philosophy, that is—but before a hearty approval of the monumental programme let me remark that ice is the thinnest here. It would be easy to stumble here, to produce bloodless illustrations of tenets ‘in the sacred ectasy of greata desires,’ or thesis sheets crammed to suffocation didactically in its overabundance, driven by a crampy will to communicate much. Luckily, as I said, Iscsu has a meditative frame of mind. He carefully outlines his sweeping project, designating its coordinates with the resolve of a geographer of the enlightenment, but…he also begins to draw. To draw, to niggle with patches, to drawn shakingly firm lines. He abhors one thing: redundancy, so there are no two identical lines, no two identical basic motifs. Some suggest an apparently homogenous surface with a few loose movements, Iscsu needs hundreds of sleighing lines, innumerable masses of rolling dots. He calls the basic units of his pictures, pixels, after the smallest elements of electronic decomposition. Let us analogously imagine an over-ambitious software designer who wishes to assign each dot of his screen an individual character. Well, Iscsu attempts the impossible, lending an individual reading and character to that which is destined for uniformization. Just as in Borges’ Babel library, in Danilo Kis’ monstrous encyclopaedia broken down to persons, or in Christian Boltanski’s infinite boxes, each element has its own history and personality, the only [!] additional difficulty is that the viewer-detective must reconstruct the history of the balls of pixels, since photos, the lifepath, are missing.

Let us take a step closer forward—and backward. From the sheets condensing countless individuals, a town is being built, with towers, proud facades, characterless wall surfaces, with building types promoted from dull to valuable by time. A town that was created almost from naught in keeping with the requirements of mining and then up-to-date manufacturing industry, a town that was bounced upon and wrenched by socialist planning, a town that was showed off and exploited in the name of occasional ideologies, a town that was dropped and abandoned when its temporary use had been depleted, a town that still does not give up. Its typical and accidental motifs in the photos cut into squares, get just as much weight as the reels f the graphic sheets. They must muster the details without anger or prejudice, producing the basis of reference for the edifices in the middle of the space. In Iscsu’s paper town, the uniform inhabitants line up nicely or stream, spin, bustle in the attraction of a line of force or idea, just as their flesh-and-blood equivalents do. Nevertheless, the point is not socio-graphic presentation. The construction and its inhabitants have their own life, balancing just as delicately between the universal and the particular as in the artist’s other works.

Leaning even closer, one reaches the personal level of the sheets. At this degree the works appear truly structured in coordinates. They can be read clearly, their many tiny grimaces. Blows, wheels, houses, stars, sperms, and fishes, in an endless row. Each a trifle in itself, like letters of a peculiar alphabet, elements of a visual diary written in cipher that is decipherable. As a crowd, a ,ass, an uncontrollable flow, they address us most pungently, exposed to the whims of chance and the twists of fancy, freed from the rigour of logic. These seemingly insignificant elements drawn with patience, love, and light-hearted humility, can lend a richness to the sheets by their seeming eventuality and weightlessness, thereby lending a personal credit to the abstract ideas. They render the domains between the conception aspiring after universal dimensions and the loose, rolling, zigzagging scaps of thoughts and flicks of hand also letting in the subconscious trespassable. They lure the viewer into discovering this infinite realm forced into strict coordinates.

-- Gabor Pataki

2008
XXIV Miskolkci Grafikai Triennále, Miscolc, Hungary
‘Gdansk Lions’, International Ex-libris Competition, Gdansk, Poland

2005
Tokyo International Mini-print Triennial, Tokyo, Japan