KOLESZÁR KATA: Who holds the flowers?
Kata Koleszár’s painting practice has for years been consistently organized around the notion of the garden, which appears not as a traditional landscape motif but as a symbolic and psychological space, simultaneously interpretable as a refuge, an enclosed world, and an inner state. It carries the promise of calm, while its maintenance requires constant attention and care.
Underlying the works is the personal experience of an accelerated, overloaded present, in which the desire for presence and the difficulty of achieving it coexist. Within a context of overlapping information and events, attention fragments, and the possibility of slowing down or withdrawing becomes increasingly uncertain. In this framework, the longing for refuge - whether real or imagined - emerges not as a fixed, closed space, but as a continuously re-forming experience, shaped not from the outside but through the ongoing rewriting of the present and memory.
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In this sense, the “garden” is not a stable, bounded place but a perceptual and mnemonic field that comes into being through the constant reconfiguration of experience. This approach resonates with Henri Bergson’s conception of time and memory, in which the past does not exist as a closed layer of time but as an active presence continuously reinscribed into present experience. Accordingly, the pictorial space is not a background but a shifting mental configuration in which time does not separate but condenses.
Recurring visual elements in the paintings are floating, drawn flower forms that do not clearly integrate into the compositional structure. At times they appear as decorative patterns, at others as vegetal elements, yet neither role becomes fixed. Their presence remains uncertain: they cannot be anchored to a specific object or surface, and it is unclear what sustains them within the space. Rather, they function as transient phenomena that emerge and temporarily persist.
The title Who holds the flowers? articulates this suspended condition, in which the flowers are not clearly connected to anything and lack spatial support. This raises the question: what sustains their presence? Or more precisely, what modes of consciousness and memory make it possible for us to perceive them as “present” at all?
The porcelain figures appearing in the compositions further intensify this unstable and ambivalent spatial experience. The motif is linked to an idealized, enclosed world rooted in the childhood experience of grandparents’ vitrines: carefully arranged, untouchable spaces. It evokes the notion of a protected, preserved order populated by familiar animals which, once removed from the display case, become vulnerable. The porcelain figure emerges as a recurring marker of contemporary fragility: within the paintings they appear as empowered guardians, yet their materiality renders them fragile and immobile.
In this sense, refuge does not appear as a concrete location but as a presumed state within the paintings. The compositions are structured around this possibility: imagined spaces endowed with protection, images of withdrawal and the desire to detach. This desire is continuously present, yet never stabilizes; it only temporarily coheres before dissolving again, much like memory itself, which constantly rearranges its own images.
The flowers do not remain in place, the spaces do not close, and the figures do not provide secure protection. The compositions suggest a fragile balance in which protection and uncertainty, the promise of calm and its impermanence coexist - suggesting that stability itself may be nothing more than a momentary, sustained condition within constant transformation.