János Béres: Brat
(2019, Handshake Europe Sculpture Park)
The three-day Almádi Days was organized in July 2019 in the St. Elisabeth’s Park. The program on the opening day July 12 commenced with the inauguration of János Béres’s bronze sculpture “Brat”.
The Brat is a 43 inches tall torso with no arms, like Venus de Milo. It captures the moment when a little girl becomes woman expressing with this the continuity of life. The stone apple on the tail of the torso stands for femininity but also refers to the golden apple from the Greek mythology as well as to the Tree of Knowledge.
As János Béres told, he created a new statue for the Handshake Europe Sculpture Park by rethinking an earlier artwork of him.
As Imre Péntek, József Attila Prize decorated poet told “This artwork comprises play, phantasy, hidden erotica, as well as the serenity of wilderness. The author goes back with this composition of surrealistic view to the Greek-Roman and Renaissance body representation.”
This sculpture creates one rhythmical unit with the trees of the park around. It almost becomes part of the grove. The unity of organic forms is broken by the angular plinth which also highlights the artwork at the same time. Stepping closer to the statue we get a grip of an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand we see the preciously modelled work of a sculptor with excellent sense of forms, flashing the classical beauty and grace. He raises, on the other hand such metaphysical, anthropological questions by presentation of the adolescent girl, which undermine the breathy sense of beauty.
The Brat stands on the borderline of childhood and adulthood. A torso. The arms are missing purposely. She’s tending to be a woman. Secondary sexual characteristics are developing. In fact, she is a Centaur creature. With devil tail and a funny cap. The apple at the end of the devil tail is symbolic (maybe that of temptation?). The internal events of this transient creature can be understandable just through these symbols. She wants to get grown up, wants to be integrated in the World, but at the same time she keeps on being an extraordinary, eccentric - autonomous - individuality. She has desire, concept, ambition and action. But everything goes wrong. Pleasure, desire, happiness, threat, anxiety, injury. Angel and Devil.
The author seems to project these irreconcilable-looking experiences at first ironically than dramatically.
Endre Sipos, Art-Philosopher
