Laszlo Otto. Painting
By Peter Lodermeyer
Most of Laszlo Otto's paintings are dark, but not gloomy. Black, dark-gray, midnight blue, they are not expressive carriers of subjective moods, but stores of repressed energy that only slowly release themselves, requiring a patient gaze to enable careful differentiation between what is black and what is "nearly black". The arc segments extending from the edge of many of Otto's paintings into the space of imagination are similar to a telescopic view into outer space, whereby we never know for certain, whether this view is cast to the world as a whole or to be fathomlessness of our inner spiritual world. Otto's pictures space always implies both. It is, – to quote Rilke – the world of inner space (“Weltinnenraum” ).
Laszlo Otto began working as a freelance painter in 1989, the time, the same year the Iron Curtain ripped apart, beginning in Hungary. Freedom and new starts are for him central artistic categories, one of their manifestations being traveling. Mount Zengö, in Otto's southernHungarian homeland, was important as a departure point for his diverse launches into new geographical and cultural territories. For this reason, it had to be painted. Likewise, there were the keyhole forms of the giant Kofun graves that Otto visited during travels to Japan in 2002/03, and later the winding towers of coal mines that had been shut down in the Ruhr Valley. Painting means for him to be on the go, and he jokingly refers to his car as his studio. It is much more than mere anecdote when he mentions that, at the time he decided to make up painting, he wanted to work with en easel like the one on Kersting's famous portrait of Caspar David Friedrich. The fact that Otto understands painting as an instrument of freedom, and – based solely on its own means – attributes it the capacity for confronting the great metaphysical and existential questions concerning life, the world, and mankind, certainly goes back to our Romantic heritage. (Düsseldorf, where he has been living since fall of 2006. is for Otto not only the place where Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter were actively working, butit is also still the city of the unhappy City Music Director Robert Schumann.) Where numerous painters see their paintings as only another station for therestless medial motifs yet to pass through, Otto's romantic “untimeliness” is precisely a timely counterpoint. This applies as well to his emphasis upon the craftsmanship techniques, his eagerness for continually improving the glaze technique of his oil and acrylics painting, for refining the quality of the colour surfaces, and for ever more subtly harmonizing the relationship between shiny and matte.
Otto's paintings work with meaning, but they are not symbolic in the sense of a language of symbols, which may be decoded. They rather operate with an intuitively understood “basic symbolism”, the contrasting between above and below, inside and outside., light and dark, vertical and horizontal, square and circle, the encapsulation of forms ant their dissolution, unit and multitude. Outof these simple oppositions, huge echo chambers for associations come about. These pictures do not make years before he has the feeling he has understood a work enough to be able to give ittitle. The titles are then mere hints, not keys, as though the works could be opened like containers in order to retrieve their finished “meanings”.
Mostly the picture fields are crossed vertically with dense streams of particles, as if from cosmic background radiation. This may light up to became cold glaring fields of light, like those we see on have works Otto painted in 2006 at the Yehudi-Menuhun-Forum in Marl. Strikingly often, the pictures have been horizontally decided into two parts, sometimes in a razor-sharp line, sometimes only using an invisible “mirror axis”, the two dark fields standing immeasurable heights and depths, as privileged as it is lonely. Otto's paintings seem to be borne by a need for knowledge. They indicate things beyond themselves, without intending to define what this Being-Beyond-Themselves is. Their geometry is less constructivist than symbolic, an attempt to lend the non-visible a rational form, and to find approachable paths into the unknown.
Dr. Peter Lodermeyer
Bonn, December 2006