Pictures without text

interview with Ágnes Hincz
by Edna Rijek, Beeldende Kunsten, 2001

• I am not interested in its [drawing's] ontological references.
• The drawings are not accompanied with texts.
• I am mainly interested in the form of the drawings.
• (...) art theory always has a narrative role.
• They are just pictures without text.

Ágnes Hincz's drawings compose a special color on the palette of graphic art. They are independent, conscious, and complete, not sketches for other art works. Their form is free and rich; we could even call them virtuosic, if this word did not have a certain pejorative connotation. Her drawings are made of clean and abstract shapes, but occassionally with a sense of natural forms. The organic structures sometimes work to conceal, sometimes to reveal the composition of the drawing. Ágnes Hincz's art is variety persistently repeated.

Rijek: My first question is, why drawing? Is drawing for you a personal attitude or is it a nostalgia? If you prefer classical genres, why don't you make paintings?

Hincz: This is more than one question. I don't paint pictures because I am not interested in colors or light. I do not draw out of nostalgia. I draw because drawing is a very simple technique. I create images with its help but I am not interested in its ontological references.

Rijek: There are natural or organic forms that can be identified in your drawings. Where do these motifs come from? Each of your drawings is complete, well planned and impeccable. But they are far from those things that we usually call "drawings". Where did this route begin and how did you get to where you are now?

Hincz: Good question. I could either talk about it for a week or not answer it at all. Are you sure you want to hear this?

Rijek: I think it would be important. Some of your drawings are trivially simple constructions; others are rather complex and exciting. I feel it is difficult to decide whether your drawings are just maniac gestures or representations of some deep philosophical ideas. "This way nothing else but empty beauty and elegance are created, and the problematic relation of the drawings and their medium is emphasized." Somebody wrote this about you, and I think it would help a lot to know more about the road that leads to your drawings.

Hincz: There was another sentence in that article: "This is a form of cyborg-conscioussness that obsesses the mind so hard that leaving the virtual space behind, we actually want to create it in reality." Do you think I should respond to a nonsense like this? You are an art historian; do you use the term "empty beauty"? The drawings are not accompanied with texts. Any "verbal sauce" would make them worse.

Rijek: Is this why you don't have titles?

Hincz: I haven't thought of this. I don't care about titles. Back to "empty beauty", that critic had got into the heart of the matter although she had no idea about it. I make drawings and you look at them. There is nothing beyond this. This is empty beauty. I don't know how decent it is but I think this rude 21st century needs a bit of decency like one needs a bit to eat.

Rijek: This is not so simple. Works of art always refer to other works of art. Art always has some predecessors. Nobody comes from nowhere. Your drawings are mysterious. It is hard to find where they belong in the space of aesthetics. This is why I asked you to talk about how it all began.

Hincz: What can I say? If every work of art refers to some other works of art then my drawings do too. If they are there you can see them. I draw a lot and sometimes I exhibit them so that people can see them. This artistic activity has its history. Many artists do the same. But well, I guess I know what you would like to hear. My first drawings were scribbles; instinctive, psychotic scribbles that one draws in a notepad during long, boring lectures. It seems I sat in many boring lectures and after a while scribbling became more interesting for me than the lectures. I have never drawn anything else but these scribbles. You could say that I am mainly interested in the form of the drawings. I still feel strange moving a piece of charcoal over paper to create the illusion of a human face. About the road how I got here, I could say a few words, I began with simple drawings and later they became more complex.

Rijek: Are you interested in the meaning of the drawings at all?

Hincz: If you mean that the drawing is used as a means to communicate something I had in mind to others then I say, no. I think fine art is not like comic strips or puzzles from the supplement of a Sunday paper. There is something in the drawings that you cannot talk about. Not because these things are so deep or mysterious but because they are visual things. You could describe to someone Beethoven's Symphony IX or Händel's Water Music but it would be in vain if that person could not listen to them.

Rijek: This sounds as if you said that the drawings have an end in themselves. They form a discrete universe that is impenetrable by aesthetic ideas.

Hincz: You said it beautifully, but actually I think the opposite. Aesthetic ideas make a discrete universe and this is why they cannot "penetrate" fine arts or a part of them; only the part that falls outside of them. Don't forget that art begins when the pencil touches the paper and that art theory always has a narrative role. If theory cannot describe something that you have seen then you cannot say that that thing does not exist. If you do not see anything there is nothing to narrate. You hesitate to interpret my drawings as "superscribbles" or as philosophical insights. You would like me to say insignificant things so that you can put my drawings in one box or another. How simple it would be to say that they are views of inner landscapes, visions or products of a virtuosic hand, as I said, that they have complex and mysterious meanings or that I do not care about them. You have seen them, so you decide what you say about them.

Rijek: You didn't leave too much space for me to move in, but I'll try do my part. My hesitation comes from the fact that some of the drawings are "superscribbles" others are sophisticated abstract compositions. Continuity is preserved by a kind of virtuosic style (probably some kind of mannerism). Is it possible that you could make your selections more carefully? Or do the individual drawings compose a bigger whole and put one another between quotation marks? In the course of one and a half years you make hundreds of drawings, quite a lot. It is physically impossible for you to spend much time with one single drawing. This is where my hesitation comes from.

Hincz: Why do you care whether it takes a year or a day to make a drawing? Why does it matter how many copies of them I make? Is the aesthetic value of a work of art influenced by its rarity? I think the reason for your hesitation is that you see a collection of works, an artistic corpus and not drawings. My drawings are not series of works (though sometimes I make series) even if they strengthen one another. Of course, not hundreds of the drawings and not all at the same time. And you did not see them all. Even if you could go through them you couldn't see them all. A year would not be enough to see them all. You formed your conception on the basis of ten or twenty drawings.

Rijek: Should I see them all?

Hincz: They are just pictures without text.