Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

 

The Weirdest of Dreams

 

 

On Veronika Breuer

 

Nostalgia – the morbid longing for a nest that might never have existed – leads to the weirdest of dreams, I admit. Born in Western Europe in the early sixties, with the old, polite world still standing on one foot, I remember trees, old tools and ancient habits, surviving in my grandmother’s home and garden. My grandmother was born in 1906. In the same year, the French writer Paul Léautaud writes in his diary that the jury of the Prix Goncourt is divided between extreme leftists (Mirbeau, Huysmans and others) and moralising writers who stand for decency. Today one might suggest that the so-called left is fossilised and moralising while the right has started thinking freely again. The world seems to be darker than ever, steered by halfwits dictating the rules for billions of suppressed people, confirming an age-old distrust for individual freedom, responsibility and creativity. If only we could allow people to think and act for themselves!

 

But didn’t I start this lament mentioning a dream? The weirdest of dreams? I did, but shame prevents me from describing it. Isn’t it embarrassing to admit that one harbours hope? But I must, for I was asked to do so by Veronika Breuer. ‘Cannot you write some words about me?’ she asked. ‘About my photographs? About your motivation to stand by me?’ Here I go. First some words about my dream, and then some words about Veronika Breuer. 

 

Thirty-five years ago, Eastern Europe was liberated from the Soviet dominion. Women my age had received a thorough communist education. They had been encouraged to become architects, musicians, engineers, more so than in the West. Suddenly, their daughters were free. Today, some of these daughters arrive in my country, seeking a more ‘contemporary’ higher education in the arts. And our dreams meet. For some of them still know how to milk a cow (Anna Godzina, Moldova), harvest corn (Simona Mihaela Stoia, Romania), sew garments (Victoria Parvanova, Bulgaria) while reading Kant, loving Barby and Dolly Parton and mastering their new craft (painting, sculpture, photography). Watching movies made by young filmmakers from Eastern Europe, I dream of a renewed passion for traditions and crafts, appreciated for their liberating powers, connected to animals and plants, connected to our bodies, connected to the winds, the rain, the snow, the mountains, the forests, tasty bread and cheese. (I am an idiot, I know.)

 

Apart from my irrational attraction to young Eastern European people, I believe progress springs from the margin and from hybrid cultures. Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol: sons of immigrants. Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois were immigrants themselves. Susan Sontag was of Jewish-Polish descent. And so on. Hybridity can also spring from social differences. Paul Léautaud grew up in poverty, far from the bourgeois world he would transcend intellectually and artistically through sheer intelligence, diligence and a consequent, uncompromising attitude.

 

Veronika Breuer was born to an Austrian father and a Hungarian mother. She grew up in a bilingual world, surrounded by a flock of siblings. This seems to have conferred a certain permeability onto her, an individuality that manifests itself softly, in a seemingly fragile manner which I would like to describe as a cautious resistance, open but firm. Her photographs are atmospheric, dominated by dark blues, greens or reds. Their poetic value seems to spring from a brittle texture reminding us of mist or the tender flesh of certain leaves. They have the body of curtains, loaves of bread, cheese, wood or soil. 

 

The particular nature of these photographs, I believe, is no accident, but the result of a persistent fiddling: printing photographs, rephotographing them… touching, forgetting and rediscovering. To be honest, I believe that Breuer tries to release as least photographs as possible. If they are out there, it’s because she couldn’t hold them back anymore. She doesn’t ‘produce’ photographs, she tries to make them disappear. I love this. For art in itself rarely moves me. If it doesn’t spring from a life lived fully, it bores me to death. 

 

Last year Breuer was trying to figure out how to show some photographs without really showing them. One of them was projected with an overhead projector. It was an image representing a young woman mopping a wet floor. The image was based on a black and white 4x5 HP5+ ilford negative, rephotographed to obtain a negative with a positive image.

 

Some printed photographs found themselves glued in a handmade book. The Hungarian title ‘A Duna Vallomása’ could be translated as ‘The Danube’s Testimony’. The English title ‘By the Danube’ refered to the location of Breuer’s wanderings but also to the life giving, nourishing nature of big rivers like the Nile, the Amazone or the Yangtze. The book found itself on a table covered with sand and 30 million year old clay, pushed up from the belly of the earth and forming a insoluble wall guiding the Danube.

 

In a second room you could hear the song ‘A Duna Vallomása’, performed by Mihály Víg, the long time collaborator and composer of Bela Tarr and one of the main actors in the film Sátántangó. Breuer asked him if he wanted to sing the song for her so she could record it on a cassette tape. The song was played by the recorder she used to record it. It was based on a poem by Ady Endre. In this poem the poet asks the Danube about things it has witnessed.

 

The light coming from the street window and entrance doors was tinted by a fabric treated with a selfmade mixture of beeswax with linseed oil and pumpkin seed oil. The ‘curtains’ closing the space were torn and stitched and treated with the same mixture. The backside window was veiled by a fabric soaked in the 30 million year old clay mentioned above.

 

The presentation was a result of multiple collaborations. Anna Breuer made the clay table; Lilla Starkbauer and Sharon de Levi helped Breuer gather the clay, Julia Breuer helped her stitch the split curtains, Kutasi Pál from Kesztölc gave her a big chunk of beeswax (he didn’t let her pay for it), Szabó Miklós taught her how to bind a book, Clemens Schedler gave feedback on the graphic design, Alberto Eloy Rodríguez helped her to turn a negative into a ‘positive’ by rephotographing and developing it with sodium carbonate to make it rich in contrast. Mihály Víg sang a song.

 

I like this down to earth, hands on, concrete thinking. Somehow it escapes the academic and pseudo academic approach to life. It seems to breathe. It gives me breathing space.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 25 February 2025