Kalmár János

Radnóti Sándor:

Abstraction of János Kalmár (1952) relates not only to the form. His figures do not represent a person, not a man or women, and not even a type of person, but the person. The gestures (not movements!) that he depicts are completely general: everyone lowers, raises their head, looks back etc. The vertical direction of the abstraction, the upwards elongation of the forms, creates a certain unsteady helplessness, but this too is the most general form of anthropology: it is related to nothing other than the fate of man. At this point, having reached – as the beginning of Kalmár’s mature period – the end point of the abstraction. At this degree of elongation a standing person becomes an unsteady, delicate reed, albeit a thinking reed.