From The Sea – G’s selected and new photos of Venice, with poems by Kamil Kárpáti

- the third joint album about Venice with photos and poems in which the creators merge and we (readers-viewers) witness their ever increasing dual radiation

Literary historian Lajos Szakolczay wrote about the Venice albums in the periodical Kortrás in 2015:

“Alliance between Gí the photographer and Kamil Kárpáti the poet? Their bond is far stronger: belonging together. In body, in soul, in thought. The two photo albums (Mirage in Venice 2007 and Streets beneath streets – Gí’s Venice 2013) are the products of thinking together for many decades – one giving life to the other in an endless circle. They are photo albums extended with poems. The poetry of the picture and the poem root in one and the same experience: a love of Italy. And more closely – can life-giving light have strata? – a passion for Venice. At every moment the renaissance is passing down the Rio to lure Fellini to it with his life-generating hero Casanova: what fullness of life! The floor of the underwater street is shiny – though he gondola is gliding in prison darkness – because the road is heated by love and lust. The road that has to be covered by anyone who wishes to capture something of the magic of the moment superseding his mood of self-flagellation or self-gratification. He must unite, adding his tiny personal cosmos to the universe, with all the forces – History, Art, etc. – that pour out their seductiveness with frightening exuberance.

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Paolo Spinelli (former ambassador of Italy to Hungary) writes about Streets beneath streets – Gí’s Venice, and Gí’s 2014 calendar of Venice:

“I can’t remember exactly whether it was Susan Sontag or another theoretician of the ‘eleventh’ Muse who pointed out: there is no objectivity in photographic art. A photo is always subjective. It shows a segment of the real world as it is experienced at that given moment by the artist. In other words: it is not the smaller or greater coincidence of the picture with reality that determines its meaning, its quality. – Reality, by the way, does not exist in art, or, more precisely, it is as many kinds as many artists seek to explore its substance, giving a representation of it from time to time in accord with their style, moral and aesthetic principles; in short how they perceive and interpret what there is in front of their eyes.

Actually, an artwork sheds the objectivity of its point of departure, lives autonomously and metamorphoses in the eye, head and heart of each viewer, who perceives, experiences and interprets it as his. A circular route forms between art and the recipient which enriches the former with diversity and ambiguity, and differentiates it from other, linear and unidimensional activity of the mind (such as the transmission of scientific knowledge). And although we, men and women of the 21st century, are ready to confirm all this for literature, art, and even for cinematography, we are reluctant to apply it to photography, as if it was the last stronghold of the eternal and unchangeable “reality”, for – as the majority contend – it is destined to show the world as it is, and not as the artist perceives it. That is what I was ruminating about when the other day I was looking at the astonishing pictures in Gí’s (Margit Lőkös’s) Venice calendar of 2014.

The photos astonish the viewer, both by their content and their form; they are often very far removed from the Venice iconography we have been accustomed to by so many canonized artists. But first and foremost, because they display the clear stylistic development of this talented artist. A great part of the calendar are simple depictions: of striking stylistic marks built of sharply delineated lights and colours (the appeal of Venice is nurtured on these two elements); stone and water: rough or rich stone in the ornaments of private palaces, and the water of the canals which at first returns the glance of the traveller with a troubling innuendo. Here everything (or almost everything) is far less distinctly defined than in her earlier works. However brilliant the pictures are suggesting perfect mastery, they sometimes supersede themselves, get mixed within a single frame, one can hardly differentiate the components of diverse shots (figures, objects, venues). Gí deliberately resigns from inspiration, but neither does she want to stay aloof and letting us taste the dish of reality alone, as if the artist had been liberated of everything once and for all. Rather, she’d like to draw us into her world, into her phantasies, into the utter freedom of interpreting the reality that exposed itself to her eyes. She asks us to take an active part, to let us be carried away by the strong inspiration (and embarrassment) that these very unusual pictures engender in us. She asks us to play with her, to accept her photos, or for that matter, to reject them (and why not?). At any rate, she calls on us to respond in accord with out taste, sensitivity, to interpret these lines, colours, lights, the turbid patches of sky and earth, persons and objects. Or, rejecting the subtle lure emanating from the pictures, to simply admire their novelty. In short, she stimulates, provokes us, we can’t stay impassive.

I think the art of photography has rarely underscored as intensely as the innovative photos of Gí’s calendar and her new Venice album do the truth of what I said earlier about the delusive objectivity and the freedom of the photographer to forward “her” feelings, “her” state of mind to us and to elicit certain recipient responses deliberately. The ultimate goal of all this is to initiate a two-way current which complements the work and closes the circular route of communication which the work began to trace. She is an innovative artist who has the courage to leave the well-trodden path of “decorative” photography: Gí set herself a challenge and won.