Sándor Vály
The Table of Giotto
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
27.9.–8.10.2006
The Gothic perspective which appeared in Western art for the first time and broke the space was able to include in itself several moments at the same time. The perspective of time appeared. The time perspective of the past and the present took the viewers into the space where they became part of the events. The structure of the work of art and its mythology was changed when the space was divided. At that moment, the inner and the outer, the public and the private parted and changed the scene of world history. It created a new order of time and space. The norm of how space was used changed because different moments of time could be expressed through the use of space. (In this way, Gothic was superior to Byzantine art and it stepped into the space, taking along the viewer who became an eyewitness.) A complicated time structure was born in the work of art and in long, multiple episodes, it changed into
a chain of events which happened in another time. Gothic art was the first trying to express and reach the inner human being. Gothic solved the Byzantine style and the movement bringing emotions into art.
The Italian Renaissance critics first used the term gothic to express their contempt for this particular style thinking that the Goths who destroyed the Roman Empire brought the style with them to Italy. Gothic = Barbarism.
The idea and the spiritual centre of my work is exactly this barbarism in gothic which I want to express in the perspectives, structures and physical existence of my pictures and sculptures. My works are observations and wonderings, experiments to reach and live this meaning
of barbarism which I here and now, in this moment have lived again and transposed it, so it has become the way the spirituality of gothic was in the eyes of the Renaissance critics.The table of Giotto is an imaginary table which appears in my works sometimes as a whole, sometimes only partially. It sustains the written spirituality in itself and contains some kind of fictive, gothic cubism where the inner meets the outer, the past meets the present and the public world meets the private world.
The Table of Giotto–works were born during my trips to Italy 2002 between 2006.
