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On the Track of Paradise Lost

Krisztina Szabó, more commonly known as Cristell, invites us for a peculiar, internal trip. The majority of her paintings are spiritual paintings, religious and abstract; heavenly light is depicted. We can easily associate the latter one with God, since the main meaning of light is the synonym of God. God created the light (Let there be light! Book of Genesis, 1.3) and Jesus Christ is the light of the world (The Gospel according to John, 1.1 and 8.12). The expressive, powerful use of the colours may be derived from a far relationship with the Austrian Junge Wilde (“wild youth”), such as Herbert Brandl and Maria Lassnig. The majority of her paintings are figurative. The woman questions: who am I? What is womanliness and what does effeminacy mean? The answer is various: a self-portrait in the role of an “op-art” style diva, a Romantic style painting of a woman wearing a hat, and several eroticized and idealized Helmut Newtonian female figures, often in the context of heavenly love. In one of her paintings, the woman looks at and yearns for the floating man in the background, turning out of the painting. This is the condition of childish impurity, which occurs before people are obliged by a moral code. The mythical Eden, from where these faun-like creatures belong, lies on the devastating experiences of the earthly existence. The painting of an enlarged eye with hyperrealistic and geometric elements has a specific place in Krisztina Szabó’s art. Since the avant-garde movement, it has shown a great concern about the question whether we are aware of the meaning of the separate parts of the human body. Are we able to see it? Leger has already asked the question, what kind of a single, plastic value does the human figure represent? Robert Mapplethorpe dedicated a separate photo-series to this issue. However, the eye takes a seeded place among the parts of the body, as it is a synonym for the spirit of our collective mind.

Considering the painter’s life-work, Krisztina Szabó, ignoring the issues of everyday reality, such as sociology pictures, still life and landscape, searches for the importance and dual nature of existence, God, woman and man, being immersed in the spirit.