Piroska Jávor: Play on the ‘Parnassus’

Szentendre cannot complain about the Muses being rare visitors in the past hundred years. Artists’ interest in the small town with a Mediterranean atmosphere stemmed from the Society of Szentendre Painters, which was established by those students of István Réti who made their home here in 1926. Painters started to visit in large numbers already in the 1930s, and several settled here. After 1945, numerous artists of renown worked at what was called the ‘Old’ Artist Colony. So there was no shortage of painters when, towards the end of the 1960s, the decision was made to build a new artist colony on Szentendre’s Kálváriadomb (Calvary Hill). The studio flats were completed by the autumn of 1969, and sculptor Tamás Asszonyi, and his wife, painter Piroska Jávor were among the first residents.
For decades, the New Artist Colony has provided a peaceful atmosphere for creative work, making it the veritable Parnassus of Szentendre.

Piroska Jávor moved to the colony after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts. Initially attracted to the decorativeness of fired enamel, she also experimented with tapestry-making before settling on painting as her medium of expression. Over the many decades, the geometric non-figurative and constructive modes of image-making became salient endeavours in the art that has been born in Szentendre. This was the direction Piroska Jávor took as she developed her own idiom. The curious, floating formations first appeared in the early aquarelles, which occasionally also carried objective references. In the subsequent oil paintings, she used irregular motifs to instil the geometric forms with a personal character, which itself is rendered intellectual by the precision that erases the individual hand in the background. Crystalline structures came to inhabit her formal vocabulary over the past 20 years or so, and the regular geometric shapes and mathematical correspondences have become more playful. The letters and numbers became meaningful forms and rhythmic patterns at the same time, while the colours can be interpreted as the beats of visual melodies.

Piroska Jávor: Garden series, V (Its Ornaments Are Not Yet Falling, 2005)