Icarus Hits Rock Bottom

There's something in clichés – Gábor muses on his terrace, puffing on his e-cigarette as he gazes into the slightly smog-blurred view of the city – like: the higher you climb, the harder you fall. After his stroke, Vasarely was so shut off from the world by his family that there was no chance of the vision he had promised me, that I’d be the world-famous young artist, coming from behind the Iron Curtain, by '89-90.

After the creative-collaborative process with the Master and the exhibition in Paris, instead of moving on to Aix-en-Provence, I returned to the reality of Budapest before the regime change. To an envious and uncomprehending country, where very soon, I also found the Swedish scholarship, the French exhibition, and Victor's mentorship to be unrealistic.

As if all of that had happened to someone else.

Instead of the glamour of Paris, London, and New York came the reality of small domestic galleries and the Pesterzsébet Museum. The art world and the authorities watched me suspiciously, and the critics slammed everything Vasarely considered good and innovative. They compared the backlights of my paintings to mass-produced neon and Christmas lights and hummed indul- gently when I used resin as paint and replaced canvas with glass. I turned towards functioning and viable sculpture, to architecture. I had built my first house by 1992. To finance this, I drew thousands of portraits and caricatures of tourists on Vörösmarty Square and in Balatonfüred.