Lightened material inside, outside - About Zsolt-József Simon’s art

(Published in New Ceramics, http://www.new-ceramics.com/index.php?id=15 )

White bodies intersect themselves into the space drawing zig-zag shades - almost as a second skin, a new identity - around themselves to complement and reformulate their snow whiteness. Some recalls a broken toy-highway, while forming the infinity symbol of 8; the other, like a sea shell house, or a mysterious flower; there is a group of nine, a chain... a necklace emerged by the ellipsis of the nine planets. A spinal’s line… And there is a beautifully arched beam frozen in the moment...
Researching the once had air’s cave, hole and the direction of force had insane in the material of plaster and porcelain statues; observing how the artist brushed the clay, or just slit it to establish a space for the liquid material (and for the future sculpture) - Zsolt Simon-Joseph’s statues invite us to come to this subject. To see that just like in a darkroom the light and the shadow exchange place, so change location the firm and the soft: the clay which you can form though it keeps its shape which encompass and lead the mass of the plaster and porcelain. Because the artist’s main goal is to keep moving the retaining plastic material. So in this case the ordinary silicate technique is not just a simple technique that controls the suffering material to reach the idea of a nice, beautiful, surprising (…) statue. But this technique and the newborn statue-body come from the same “parents”: the movement and the space.
Anxious, everyday alchemist is only interested in gold. The one eager of knowing all the secrets of Nature is more interested in to understand transformation and metamorphoses. Simon Zsolt József is in the group of the second one. He helps to world these statues to make visible all the movement and flow, to give a kind of creative object-documentation of creation, of “genesis”. These objects let us see how forces pull, attract life from dead material, how life is breaking up the rigid pegging and long for a movement of soul, and the realization of his own spiritual entity through infinite transformations. This creative process needs a meditative and awake mental status in the same time. The artist is not a slave either a repressive power above the material. Artist helps the material to find his form, his shape by human hands, and to go further the inanimate static position. To be lightened.
This is an exciting mental journey to this understanding, because these art pieces do not want to imitate nature. They are not flowers, not waves, they do not want to shape shells – we see them like that. Simon find a real joy in manual skills, he wins ecstasy from the difficulties of implementation, heated by the alchemistic knowledge and awareness of changes.
He was trained as a porcelain painter in a famous Hungarian porcelain manufacture, in Herend, but sport and dance were important part of his practice, too. These two sides of him – art and movement - became closer when he started his studies in a progressive art school, and, attended a special gymnastic lessons (Bothmer Gymnastic, Spatial Dynamics), too. Attracted by space, the “3D”, he applied for the silicate department of the Hungarian Collage of Applied Art (now: László Moholy-Nagy University). And when his diploma piece was on the way to Korea to “The 4th World Ceramic Biennale, 2007”, he went also to East, but to Indonesia, with a scholarship in his pocket to “forget everything” what he ever studied.
At that time like child I scribbled a lot. For a pure joy. I purposely tried to break up with the ordinary drawing shames to find that what is really inspire me regardless I am proud on it or not. Dropping down these heavy stones, undressing till almost “naked” made me easier to realize my true interest – said Simon remembering the time in Surabaya, a mega polis of Java Island, while his art piece became the part of the final qualifier of the Korean biennale.
On his works Javanese exposition, in Surabaya, long pictures (made by mixed technique: pencil, watercolor, charcoal) twisted on carton columns placing colored lines of force and flow into the space. You could also see small drawings of never existed moving animals, originated maybe from a “child”; these were hanged from above, attached to a string. And all around statues was born from marriage of plaster and clay, just as his diploma piece. Joy and playfulness, a pure euphoria of the creation radiate from these works.
Returning to Hungary he started to refine the technique, to transform it to the use of porcelain. The aim is still to preserve the appearance of the movement. This leads him even as a drawing teacher. He encourages all the adult students of the “Sunway Art School” to live inside the movement, try to preserve the chosen picture’s inner liveliness and mobility both in shape and technique. By direct experience of the motion they will be able to recognize all the movements created the surrounding world and which are reflected in their models or in their own works, too. So experience access them not only in their eyes; but their all body and their movements may be sensors. When you observe a form “outside”, practically you follow its movements “inside”. This movement can be grasped and drawn as your own. If you have a desire to form, it is good if you have what to shape. Before drawing Simon often use Bothmer Gymnastic. Like most of the reform pedagogies he tries to keep a playful sensitivity of mind to avoid “copying”, but to help the artistic experiment of reality.
His wide interest’s objects – statue, drawing, painting, interior and furniture plans – are full of living, pulsating energy, fed by the flow of a found secrets of motion. While his flower-like statues show themselves soft inside, they split into the air like pure-clean scalloped porcelain-beams, and outside they show amazing simplicity and intimidate beauty. That shows an artist and a craftsman.