The painter Ferenc Redo has been designing woven wall pictures for 40 years. He has made about a hundred and fifty works up to the present time. Apart from these, he has also made twenty-five jointly with his wife, the late Rozália Vörös. Now, as he approaches 90, the Ernst Museum is organising a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work. Apart from selected pieces of the tapestry produce, the exhibition will also include the artist’s early graphics and batik and sewn wall pictures.
Tapestry is considered first and foremost a representative genre. Apart from work officially commisioned for large communal buildings, the Redos made their favourite, chosen technique more widely available too: they developed a size which, in the approximate form of a panel picture, still provides the possibility for a richness of detail within the area they require. The popularisation of the genre also contributed to the development of Ferenc Redo’s characteristically stylized, decoratively formulated rendering. (For the most part he works with warping in threes or fours, that is to say this is the number of weft-threads within a centimetre.)
Reduction is not foreign to his approach, the summarized representation, to which in some cases, he even adds a method of composition somewhat humourous, ironic and intentionally naive. At the same time, he does not deny his original pictorial, painterly way of thinking either.
Apart from a short period when he tried out the possibilities offered by basse lisse weaving and appropriately to this, designed more decorative surfaces similar to folk hand-weaving, the vast majority of his oeuvre follows the woven wall picture, closely related to panel paintings.
His themes are also adjusted to this and avoid the merely decorative treatment of surfaces. Thematic landscapes, cityscapes, often representational scenes, the revival of the tradition of the "genre painting".
However, scenes from the classic - or personal - world of mythology often appear on his tapestries: nymphs and fauns, clowns and other "buffoons" waft into the imaginary environment, mostly in cheerful, fresh colours, in which one can scarcely feel a touch of backward looking self-mockery or by chance a gloomy, sometimes tragic overtone.
In his use of colour, from the cavalcade of luxuriant, clear colours, brimming with life, the more mixed shades, point in a darker, somewhat more melancholy direction. The traits of the draughtsman and graphic artist are palpable in the formulation of works composed with fewer colours. But he always treats the colours in a painterly way. He paints the threads himself, and the depth of the darker colours is never provided by black, but by the mixing of many colours; thus they are more vivid and the deep toned motifs are not depleted either.
This cross section of the oeuvre to be seen at the exhibition, brings to life every one of his periods, the characteristic and favourite motifs, and the best of his work fond of the lyrical and the narrative, which can with a light heart accept the label "principle of spectacle", so outdated today and the common experience of memories and impressions.
Some of the exhibited work can be purchased at the Ernst Museum.
There is a catalogue to go with the exhibition.