Every form is a consolidated movement, says contemporary artist Zsolt Jozsef Simon.
I love my creations but I am also happy to part with them because it means I can make new ones. It is a great feeling when someone says my creations are beautiful and asks me how I created them. This is when I feel the effort is worthwhile.
Contemporary artist Zsolt Jozsef Simon.
When I had to choose a career after secondary school, my choice fell, before anything else, on porcelain painting. This decision was made primarily after a visit to the only potter of my hometown when I was 12. He was making a pot with the great ease. I was mesmerised.
At school, I was a good student. I was interested in a lot of things. Learning was easy for me. I liked maths, grammar and biology. Although I was a bit chubby, I spent my afternoons playing handball and table tennis and, like all my contemporaries, I liked moving a lot.
Learning from books wasn’t a challenge for me and I didn’t have the adequate talent in sports either to continue my life in that direction. What inspired me the most was to create something with my hands. There was always somebody in my surrounding who could draw better than me, whose abilities motivated me, who I wanted to catch up with upon maturity.
While studying at the secondary school of the Porcelain Factory of Herend, I kept on pursuing sports and exercises. I practiced taekwondo, I jogged and rode a bicycle.
Age 21 was a turning point in my life. I left the Porcelain Factory and continued my studies in private. At Herend, I saw the point one could reach and what could be attained if one really strived hard. Because I saw the zenith it demotivated me but I carried on.
However, what I owe to the years I spent there was that the ability to work precisely and accurately, and to pay attention to the tiniest details. When I left the factory, I left something safe and predictable for the sake of a promising but altogether insecure and unsafe future. Curiosity and trust made me move. Both are essential in the field of creating and in everyday life as well. Without curiosity and trust, I might have never started learning drama, improvisational singing, oil painting or the Indonesian language.
This adventurous attitude made my life richer and more colourful and did not let me sink into solitude. They kept me fresh and got me in touch with a world I did not know before.
Because of the diversity of my interests, it seemed necessary for me to find an occupation that united them all. Sometimes I felt these diverse interest could tear me apart. I had to place something in the middle that could hold this multiplicity together. This was the point, at the age of 28, when I decided to continue my studies at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design where I graduated as a porcelain designer, in 2006. Later I qualified as a teacher as well. It was here that I started making my experience in the field of movement the basis of form-creation.
If someone deals with movement for a long time, forms come to life and he experiences them as movement. We realise that every form is a consolidated movement. Let us just consider the forms of plants that can be experienced temporarily, or the more or less steady-state bones of the animals.
Although it was impossible for me to condense all aspects in one thing, I spontaneously applied the living approach to movement and space that I experienced during the Bothmer gymnastics training, while creating form. For me, geometric forms were not so much the result of movement. Rather I experienced them as forms of thought. Therefore, I considered them neither satisfactory nor inspiring from the point of view of sculpture. The existence of a cube or a sphere in the physical world is imperfect as opposed to their perfect existence as thoughts.
Physical existence is not about perfection. It is life-like, full of irregularities and contains a striving for perfection. I also refrain from hasty shapelessness. I avoid those forms in which the presence of decay is rampant. It is fashionable in modern art to create objects that emphasise perishableness to the extreme, both in form and colour. However, I do not take the counterpoint of perfect geometry as the only source of inspiration in my creations. It is important for me to experience these extremes, to navigate and find the way between them, to be able to build them into my creations and keep them together in a unity. I do not blend or mix them. I just try to lead these extremes to each other as life reveals itself to us in the continuous rhythm of birth and death.
We artists, like scientists, can give form to something that has not taken shape yet. At the same time, this freedom is a responsibility. I strive to organise the fight between fragmentation and softness into a harmonious unity. My intention is not so much to remind people that everything that seems perfect is perishable at the same time.
My aim is to show that every fault may mean a means of development. And my technique is based on this. In porcelain mass production, seams mean faults on the surface of the products and the workers try to remove and work them off. I consider these faults as possibilities from which something new can be created. In fact, almost all my creations mean a multitude of faults, in which faults are developed into beauty in my shaping hands.
The traditional products made in factories are buds for me that have not sprouted yet. The bud sprouts and something new grows out of it. This cannot be traced so much in the forms of my works rather in the technology itself. Even when I carve my plaster moulds, I envisage how the fluid porcelain will flow out through the rifts and settle in the desired form. This technique also contains numerous possibilities. I merge into some of them.
Beauty is important. Maybe those who expect artists not to express criticism, shock people or to draw attention to what is wrong, but to create something that is better and more beautiful than what has existed before, have the right attitude. It is our task and not the spectator’s to do this job.We do not have to convey what is wrong to the beholder. It is not necessary to show the faults directly. This way we can see in our surroundings those pieces of art that were created with the intention of developing and striving for improvement, irrespective of whether they were created successfully or not.
An important turning point in my life was when one of my thesis works became a part of the Korean Ceramics Biennale in 2007.
Contemporary artist Zsolt Jozsef Simon
I have formed good relationships with different art galleries, although at the beginning my inquiries sent to them by email did not evoke interest. However, my successful participation in different international biennales, the good quality photos of my works, their publications in different magazines, internet blogs and on different social media sites made me visible and finally the galleries got in touch with me.
As I received more invitations, I met more people and more opportunities presented themselves in the form of exhibitions, lectures, presentations or courses. Of course, that also took me away from my wife, something which is not easy for me. Therefore months of absence is not an option in my case.
I have also learnt that it is not enough for the artist to be in the workshop and create and wait for an invitation. If there is a chance, one must travel to get acquainted with new people, to make friends. Longing is not enough. It is essential to take steps to reach our goals.
While my first attempts to attract the attention of art galleries proved to be unsuccessful, I did not give it up. I relied on my abilities and works and gradually I reached my goal. I received my first foreign invitation for a solo exhibition in Milan, for which I am very grateful to Riccardo Radaelli. It has been followed by several further invitations to exhibitions. An important milestone was the invitation by PULS Gallery from Brussels, in 2012. All my creations were sold. The next important stage was the invitation sent to me by Shozo Michikawa for the Sasama Ceramics Festival in Japan. It coincided with my 40th birthday.
I remember someone asking just 10 minutes before the exact time of my birthday how old I was. I cannot forget the look on the face of the people standing by when I replied that I would be 40 in ten minutes. All this happened while we were kneeling around the table in a traditional Japanese house built among green-tea plantations in Japan. It cemented the feeling I had as a child that I would not live all my life in my hometown and instead become a part of the larger world. It was this festival where I first had the opportunity to speak about my work and technique. There has be no looking back after this experience.
The next important event was an invitation from Fiona Barratt Interiors based in London. They wished to exhibit some of my creations. This relationship, which still continues, has made me financially secure.
Painting is the only field I have not been able to combine comfortably with my porcelain sculptures. Maybe it does not belong to my future but my past since I started as a porcelain painter. In those early years, I painted baroque bouquets or other flower patterns on baroque shaped objects. This plant-like quality can still be traced in my works – not on the surface but in the porcelain body.
At home I like eating from rustic plates that I buy from my Hungarian collagues, made in wood-fired kilns. For example, Makoto Kagoshima’s bowls with its playful and tasty patterns, Fukami Sueharu’s wave-like sword-blade sculptures and Yo Akiyama’s robust creations. For some reason, Japanese works are my favourite. The Japanese treat form and the material with exceptional sensitivity.
At the moment I am working on a collection for a solo exhibition that will be held in May 2020 in Munich, Germany. Here I wish to exhibit those creations of mine that combine the earlier flower-like blossoming forms and the powerfully rolling mass-like designs. This striving for combination is something I first understood at the Hungarian Art Academy.
Beside this, I have a lot of ideas I do not have time for. These days, I have been playing a lot with the idea of making porcelain wall reliefs. Though there was a request for such a work, I could not move in that direction. So, I have a calendar chalked out for next year where I will strive to fix this and open up days for such requests.
Before you go – you might like to browse our Artist Interviews. Interviews of artists and outliers on how to be an artist. Contemporary artists on the source of their creative inspiration.
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