Ilona Keserü started her career as a student of Ferenc Martyn, a chapter of “alternative learning” that was followed by an initiation to analytic and academic realism at the academy. The next period (1958–64) was marked by a certain dilemma, in which Keserü was exploring ways that led back to the origins of abstract art and to cognitive autonomy. In the middle of the 1960s she started in the direction that was marked by instinctual gestures and individual motifs, inspired above all by her 1962 stay in Rome: this, she claims, was the starting point of her work as a continuum. The early, diminished colour scale (1963–1964) soon gave way to the assertion of forms brought to the surface by the drawing, the power of hot-tempered movements. The numbered series of which Red Painting is a part (the ninth painting) appears to be a series of experiments that record unexpected events. Keserü calls it the “‘comparison’ of certain states.” “The freedom and abundance of the surfaces that came into being was increasing [...], the need for a new mode of modelling was overwhelming.” The last pieces in the numbered series, including Red Painting, can be considered a fulfilment, a climax, which “represents nothing apart from its own coming into existence.
Borbála Kálmán
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