Aurel Fábri: PLACE, IMPRESSION, ATMOSPHERE

Venue:

• Architecture Gallery of the Slovak Architects Society

  • Ballasov palác, Panská 15, Bratislava

When:

• Exhibition duration:

  • May 2 - May 26, 2023
  • open to the public on Monday, Tuesday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

 

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Curator: Marián Zervan

 

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Aurel Fábri: Architectural Drawings

Aurel Fábri's drawings (1958) should be examined historically, form-wise, iconographically, genre-wise and technically-technologically. We would find out that he started devoting himself to drawing during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he graduated with professor Rastislav Janák and continues to do so to this day. Initially, it was pencil drawings and later ink and Chinese markers. It was always about drawings on paper of various qualities, which he uses, but also lets them be heard. The drawing is created on a white background, and its framing changes from details to wholes: from a branch to details of a house, wholes of diverse cultural and natural environments to panoramas or silhouettes of cities. In most cases, it is a current record of an open-air situation, and we feel that it is about capturing a unique moment, a view that the drawing gives independence, but through it the author also recognizes the constitutive constitutive lines of force of the genius loci of the visited and chosen natural or urban landscape. The drawing deals with lines, points and surfaces that oscillate between defining shapes and searching for a unique mood. We can feel from her lessons from the Chinese tradition and watercolor, but also from Slovak realistic drawing. Its iconography is given by depicting real architectures and environments, rather than fictional or conceptual places. A person is sometimes completely absent in it, or is present in a scale that adds color. Therefore, one can speak of Fábri's drawing as architectural, although it becomes most convincingly architectural through the mastery of spatial plans and spatial units. However, it is never a technical architectural drawing, as its ambition is the unrepeatability of the moment in a double sense: both in capturing the mood and in the time of processing. That is why it moves on the borders of graphic and painterly expression.

The exhibition is a selection from the large and varied repertoire of Fábri's drawings. It is not a retrospective exhibition, but rather presents the diverse lines of his drawing. The selection is divided and laid out in three spaces, which are currently owned by the Society of Slovak Architects. Each of the rooms is tied to the basic components of Fábri's drawing, which we name as place, impression and atmosphere. In each of the rooms, drawings from various periods and from different environments are presented, so that a dialogue can arise, the central theme of which is one of the three components.

At first glance, the location is decisive. Fábri's drawings are a record of his wanderings and stops. In this sense, they resemble pilgrim diaries, diaries of painters or architects. But place is more than a simple motif or theme. Fábri is convinced that dissatisfaction grows in his soul and takes over his hand, that it grows into his drawing. And precisely these moments of outgrowing the drawing and the place, their mutual differentiation, are one of the focuses of this exhibition.

Others undoubtedly include the impression, the sudden and penetrating impression of the external and architectonic world in its changeability and certain indeterminacy. The drawing then acquires a characteristic syncopated rhythm of points and line abbreviations seemingly independent of location. The drawing gesture feels the place with just the eye and hand, opens up to it and receives its impulses, so that it immediately discovers its unrepeatable duration.

And that can be called atmosphere. It is not a subjective experience, but something that the landscape calls us to enter into its architecture. Then the drawing becomes a painting or more precisely a watercolor in the exact sense that the duration of a sugar cube is expressed by the time of its dissolution.

Finally, there is something that gives meaning to these three components, and that is the white indefinite void, which is not and cannot be just an undefined background, on the contrary, it is a flowing energy penetrating all directions and layers of the drawing.

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The concept of the exhibition together with the text was developed by the curator, Marián Zervan.

 

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