Gabor Szilasi: Gathering Presents of the Past
Gabor Szilasi Motorcyclists at Lake Balaton 1954 © Gabor Szilasi 2009
For more than five decades, Montreal artist Gabor Szilasi has worked diligently to create a documentary record of everyday life in Quebec, Hungary and elsewhere. Still going at the ripe old age of 82, it’s fair to say that Szilasi well deserves the 50-year retrospective that opened at the Musée d’art de Joliette this summer and continues, starting this week, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Curated by Ryerson University professor David Harris, the exhibition “Gabor Szilasi: The Eloquence of the Everyday” attempts to span Szilasi’s many bodies of work—from black-and-white street shots of Budapest in the 1950s to meticulous colour interiors of rural Quebec homes in the 1970s to collaborative portraits created with mental-health patients in the 2000s. (Szilasi’s vivid views of Montreal building facades from the 1980s and beyond will be of particular interest to Canada’s growing amateur-urbanist crowd.) In a 1977 quotation included in the exhibition text, Szilasi provides insight into his overriding philosophy: “Everything is constantly changing around us: what my camera captures at this moment is already a thing of the past. That is why it is important to me to record the world as I see it today through photography. I am not interested in the past or the future: I am interested in the present.” In the long view, this accumulation of Szilasi’s “presents” promises a lasting gift of insight for today’s art audiences. (380 Sussex Dr, Ottawa ON)
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Gabor Szilasi Classy, St. Hubert Street, Montreal, Summer 1985 1985 © Gabor Szilasi 2009 |
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