About Lure Paintings
This website contains paintings of Béla Horvát-Morvai that were created in the time period between 2010 and 2018. These paintings are on permanent display at Cellular Technology Limited (Shaker Heights, Cleveland, Ohio) serving as lures for our employee’s eyes and soul.
Paintings as lures for the human eye and soul? Some explanation might be needed here. The artist has deep ties to nature and to the natural. He also is a passionate fisherman. He has been intrigued since his childhood by fish skin. He mostly fishes in lakes. Like the lake itself that looks different with the slightest change of light, also is the look of fish skin, changing from every angle. Each new appearance is unique, each as beautiful as the other, yet they are all manifestations of the very same. And there is that deceptive quality of the glittering. The glittering of fish skin irresistibly attracts the eye and desire of fish predators. But so does the illusion created by a glittering lure, too.
Also, our human eye is attracted to everything that sparkles, and is so easily fooled by it too. Is beauty skin deep? How can glitter give the ultimate refinement to a body, like the skin to the fish? How can the shine along with the color tint of our skin, or of make up so much define our perception? On the other hand, glitter can constitute the perceived essence of a body, like light reflections on water, glass or a gem, or be the only manifestations of a body, like for an angel or ghost. Most importantly, however, in the world of abstract painting, how much can glitter be an element of its own while interacting with the universe of colors? The artist wondered whether and how these qualities of glitter can be translated into paintings.
Béla Horvát-Morvai’s lure journey started in the year 2000 with painting actual lures. The initial Lure Paintings captured the appearance and qualities of fish skin so perfectly that even the attentive human eye is at a loss.
After the artist learned to capture the magic of fish skin and bring it alive in mesmerizing miniature paintings, he started to use this technique to create abstract paintings in lure format. These were intended as pendants for necklaces: lures that not only capture men’s and women’s eyes equally but tickle their respective fancies. By the year 2009, Béla Horvát-Morvai created one thousand eight hundred miniature lure necklaces. Two of these Lure Paintings are pictured below and more can be seen at the aforementioned website.
The challenge Béla Horvát-Morvai faced was to create paintings that are deceptive in the right way. The artist’s scope is not to detract the spectator from the substantive by exploiting the human eye’s readiness to be enticed by glittering, but rather to capture the observer’s eye prompting him or her to take a close look, and an even closer look engaging a journey of discovery. By looking attentively, we can discover one level of beauty in these paintings after the other, much like one would discover when admiring a flower first by the plain eye, and then under a microscope, and then closing our eye, and internalizing the magic of both.
This leads to a central issue of the Lure Paintings. A painter creates pictures with paint strokes. Lure paintings are composed of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of paint strokes that are applied in several layers. Most Lure Paintings have dozens of semi-transparent paint strokes layered above each other to achieve the final effect. (Visiting the zoo with my young son, I just learned a chameleon uses seven layers of pigment to accomplish its artistry of changing colors). Béla Horvát-Morvai applies each of the strokes with utmost skill and discipline. To the attentive eye they look like calligraphy, and indeed, they are! In the East calligraphy has been considered the highest form of self-expression that takes decades of concentrated practice to master, and only few could elevate it to the level of “strength”. The legendary samurai spent hours every day with calligraphy to focus their mind, strengthen their will, and their ability to express it. That traditional calligraphy is about skillful and bold use of paint strokes using a single color. In Béla Horvát-Morvai’s paintings these calligraphy strokes take on additional dimensions by introducing endless shades of colors, many layers of colors, and rhythms of strokes. I would like to draw your attention to the meticulous and mastery detail of the stroke work in these paintings.
Lure Paintings are abstract. Through complex colors and an elaborate rhythm of the stroke work, the viewer is invited to “step into the paintings”, and by doing so, to step into him/herself. Much in the way that listening to good music permits us to start a journey into our subconscious, these paintings will help you access that neglected yet central field of our existence. While the paintings initiate this journey, only you can walk that path.
On many paintings you will see human-like figures. They are there to help initiate the dialogue with your subconscious self. We humans need compassionate human companions to engage in a dialogue and to perceive and share feelings. These human-like figures in the paintings are such compassionate individuals, and will lure you in to the abstract world of the painting, and through it, your deepest self. The artist calls them Perceivers.
