“The thing is, I am listening to Kézi-Chopin again. It does no harm to begin at the beginning. I came from the countryside and was certainly taken aback at the Fekete Lyuk, for example, yet I stepped over young people high on who-knows-what without batting an eyelid, although I hardly even drank alcohol back then. This time, as I welcome the last playboy back into my life, I am moved by curiosity rather than nostalgia: what can this voice and these lyrics bring, what can that old momentum bring to our lives today? And into this new space we share, which, alongside the indispensable words, Tibor Legát’s paintings now allow me to enter.

He never studied painting. He had never painted before. When I learn that he is going to have an exhibition, I do not know what kind of pictures to expect: perhaps trams slipping past, fragments of the city, or abstract canvases. But when I open the attached files, with photographs of a few paintings, I simply know them from that moment on. It seems entirely natural that he has painted Mary with the Child, and that skulls and gas masks are dancing everywhere; I know the colours, the glitter waves back at me, as do the bunches of tiny fingers. Mary with the Child. I look at this naïve icon and realise that the face behind Mary’s modest gaze is a man’s face, in which the painter’s self-portrait suddenly shines so brightly that I can no longer escape it. Elsewhere, I look into all-consuming gazes or hollow eye sockets, count the wrinkles beneath the eyes, and feel a melancholy at those sour-gherkin noses straight out of Bab Berci. The figures seem to have been enlarged from a Bosch painting.

Then I begin reading the paintings’ titles and the texts written to accompany them, and I find myself outside every picture. Stories grow out of them, each bringing a perspective through which the works become another, though not unfamiliar, Legát world. The figures I first encountered seemed to be telling my own stories, only with somehow more broken features, in lives that had been harder fought for. When the texts introduce a historical or biblical narrative, the whole Legát universe spins around me. Once again I feel what I felt listening to Kézi-Chopin’s songs back then: I am being given something that was already mine, always had been, but in forms, pictures, words and sounds in which I could never have placed it before myself. Even then, it was clear that although there is no more wonderful instrument than a beautiful, pure, trained voice, the power and freedom that work for me lie in the art of rock ’n’ roll.

Among the works is an installation made from a pair of painted jeans. Legát writes that after putting the first paint on them, he knew he would never wear those jeans again. When we meet in person to look through the paintings, in real life, so to speak, I ask him why.

And now I will dwell on that intimate situation. We lay some of the paintings out on a little table and fuss over them, although this is not how I would touch them if I were alone with them. It is much more like the way a baker handles sourdough: as though they were extensions of ourselves, tools for a life without which we would neither be who we are nor be anything at all. In other words, these improbable yet tangible works of art are blood of our blood.

So, standing before the jeans—which look as though Andy Warhol had painted them for David Bowie’s birthday on a grey Wednesday afternoon in New York, saving onto them the Hungarian words he still remembered, and as though an influencer designer were now copying them and selling numbered editions at exorbitant prices—I asked the artist why he had written that he would never wear them again. He replied that he would soon be sixty. That was not the answer I had expected. A minor detail like that would never stop me, if I owned a pair of Elvis-Levi’s-Legát jeans like these, from tearing up the Budapest night in them. Or all those grey Wednesday afternoons. But of the two of us, he is the artist. Now he has laid himself out on canvas too, even if that canvas happens to be a pair of Levi’s.

Long live the artist who has always been an artist!”

Unreviewed AI translation of the Hungarian original.