Artportal.hu

painter
(Orosháza, 1 April, 1964.)

He has been involved in painting since the 80s. At first he employed techniques canonised by traditional art. His early work reveals a search for, and choices from, various trends of various periods in order to try and test the techniques best suited for his own ideas.
In his recent work he has employed his favourite technique, i.e. he has shaped spectacles through rhythmically wiping away at the layers of paint previously layed on. He regards all surfaces of his pictures as equally vital; for him, coating, the painting of backgrounds or faces mount the same painterly challenges.
He inserts faces and figures by way of montage into his coatings of many or just a few colours. His male or female heads, whether plastic or planar in nature, and whether rich or sparse in detail, appear against a background full of motion
He is preoccupied with the problem of representing Time. His portraits represent both real and fictitious persons. It is their dominant features that attract his attention; he is intent on capturing first impressions. His pictures full of conscious improvisation tell us about the melancholy magic of so many “passing moments”.
"

Pál Bolla’s abstract paintings lend a characteristic treatment to themes, mainly passionate, that are relatively rarely chosen today. He produces his serial works relying on the expressive force of colours and forms. Starting from his primary sensory experiences, he undertakes to go through spiritual experiences, and convey them visually. In essence, it is from Nature that he draws the basic patterns and motifs of his pictures, adding his free variations. He presents many shapes with his own technical means in his own terrain of expression. Some of those shapes openly undertake to have come from Nature, some others, however, proceed into complex constellations in order to express visionary themes and spectacles. 

As he himself puts it in one of his titles (The Chance for the Infinite), he is preoccupied with unfolding and extending the greatest possible degree of artistic creation and self-expression. Like every artist, he is guided by the wish to represent sensory and spiritual possibilities revealed by the magic and meditative processes inherent in art.  He prefers the Romantic attitude of presenting cosmic sceneries arising from the minute world of man’s inner existence. It is this unusual strategy that provides the most interesting qualities of his pictures. He likes to hoard and order such organic, inherently beautiful motifs as e.g. tree-bark, flakes, age-rings, shells, snails etc.

He then applies firm gestures as he enters the accidental and helpless, almost chaotic mass of natural forms put together by the incalculable forces of Nature. He forms dynamic constructions of space dominated by the duality of the illusion of planar decorativity and that of an indefinite extension of space. Phenomena of actual  physical reality serve only to represent dimensions of a world elevated above the world of objects.  Their inseparable interdependence, however, is obvious. It is from the restless motion of structures, whether arising accidentally or regularly, that everything comes forth. From Bolla’s organic or constructed pictorial elements one can derive continuous fictions of space. Pál Bolla presents metamorphoses in a dramatic light: his flashlights provide quasi-photograms, stills that tell about motion.

Bolla’s aesthetic and the way he records the world, however, are steeped in the traditions of the Great Plains School of Painting. The roots of his art lead back to Romanticism; for all his formal ingenuity, he is existentially tied to natural scenery and Nature. His dramatic lighting technique, his highly expressive solutions, and his dark, contrasting colours all point to the same intellectual mindset, one that is ultimately determined by the same Great Plains physical environment." (Tünde Bognár)

One-Man Shows
2006 • Béla Bartók House of Culture, Pusztaföldvár
2007 • Municipal Library, Sarkadkeresztúr
2011 • Károly Tamkó Sirató Municipal Library, Pusztaföldvár

Group Exhibitions
1982 • Petőfi Culture Centre, Orosháza • House of Youth, Békéscsaba
1983 • Petőfi Culture Centre, Orosháza • Ferenc Erkel House of Culture, Gyula • EVIG Culture Centre, Budapest
1987 • Air Force College, Szolnok
1996 • Petőfi Culture Centre, Orosháza
2002 • Béla Bartók House of Culture, Pusztaföldvár
2004 • Castle Museum Gallery, Dunaföldvár
2005 • Gizi Bajor Community Centre and Library, Balatonföldvár
2007 • Municipal House of Culture, Tiszaföldvár
2009 • Orosháza Painters’ Association Show, Municipal Gallery, Orosháza
2010 • Contemporary Artists’ Charity Auction for Victims of the Red Sludge, Artists’ House, Budapest
2011 • A show by members of the Orosháza Public Arts Association at the Lajos Keller Municipal Library and Culture Centre, Mindszent • Summer Exhibition by Pál Bolla, Katalin Gnädig, Mária Lukács, and József Mihalik, Orosháza • The art collection of Wally Yit and Csilla Nemes (Yit) put on by Oceanhorizon Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada.
 

Works in Public Collections
Greek Cultural Centre and Church Art Collection, Kecskemét
Károly Tamkó Sirató Municipal Library, Pusztaföldvár