Katalin Káldi’s unfinished oeuvre, which is varied with mosaic works, photos and sculpture installations, shall basically be considered as a painter’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, she has given up painting history’s aim and greatest achievement, namely the spatial illusion created by the central and Byzantine perspectives already at the very beginning. Káldi’s object painting – which is not a very depicting type of object painting hidden behind non-depicting painting – has along with spatial homogenization kept the Reinhardt monochromy’s analytical approach as well, yet has directed it from the surroundings of the painting’s object to endless observation of the phenomena turned into a painting. The tradition of the Hungarian and international neo avantgarde and conceptual art, along with the tradition of other media than painting also had a rather significant impact on Káldi; she knows, follows and refers to these quite often.
The earliest oil-canvas surfaces are defined by the pictorial order of simple symmetry, but this basic composition method was used over and over again for decades in varied and recalibrated ways. It is probably due to this continuously forming ordering method that the favorite basic forms (dumbbells, irons, spheres, knives) appear from time to time as building blocks of different systems on the pictures.
Mónika Zsikla