BIBLIOGRAPHY

• "Nóra Teplán’s collages are the imprints of a subjective interpretation of existence, which are generalized by the archetypical pictures the artist uses. Deep, complex contents become accessible through unexpected associations and conscious image editing. Nóra Teplán turned towards painting after starting her university studies in sociology. Although she has had an inclination to create since she was a child, this was the period when she decided to commit herself to an artistic career. Presently she is in the fourth year of her studies as a painter, with József Gaál, Ákos Wechter and Mária Chilf as her masters, all of whom have a strong influence on her artistic mentality. In 2014 she won the Amadeus Foundation’s Fundamenta-Amadeus fund for artists.

  She is mainly attracted to the psychological branch of sociology. In her works – besides an extremely strong subjectivity and intuitive method of creation – there is a sort of scientific, recording-systematizing attitude, by which she seeks to grasp seemingly ephemeral associations and fantasies. She was led to creating collages through an exhibition opportunity, and it quickly turned out that this technique is most suitable to express the contents she was the most interested in, and which, for some reason, she did not feel was approachable through painting.

  The thrill of this technique is provided by arranging the artist’s findings, these independent fragments into a composition: these encounters are sometimes harmonic, sometimes full of tension. Randomness, playfulness and the ambiguity of meaning is also present here. Collage is an experimental genre; its aim is not to present a Great Unity, but it often functions as a blueprint for future, summative works. Approaching a collage as a viewer mostly works on an intuitive level; such pieces are often resilient to rational productions of meaning. Although Nóra Teplán, with her collages, joins in a strong and venerable artistic tradition, it is more of a method of working for her. When looking at her art, mentioning the surrealists is unavoidable, but this connection is indirect. Her inspirations are drawn rather from the fields of literature, music, psychology and philosophy.

  She works with motifs cut out from newspapers, magazines; even the manual acts of cutting out and pasting on are important for her. She is interested in the great questions of existence, looking for meaning, goal and direction, mapping out and understanding spiritual processes. Her works are constructed of archetypical images: she often combines motifs from nature with human bodies or parts of them. These elements are frequently superposed on each other, such as the crown of a tree – human hair, or a drapery/blanket – a blanket of snow. The trees with their crowns upside down and with their roots apparently holding on to thin air, the planets floating through the landscape, the dramatically foaming and waving waters that do not go anywhere show that the forces that are at work here are different from the laws of nature, physics or gravity. The compositions are metaphoric projections of psychological states or philosophical ideas.

  Although the associations are random to a certain extent, the precise, clear cut-outs, the strict geometrical forms (circles, squares), the balanced, organized compositions suggest a conscious, conceptual approach. This stylization and shaping elevates the collages to an artistic level, exceeding the intentions of self-exploration and self-expression. Vertical-horizontal lines of force, diagonals are dominant. From time to time, the surfaces of the images rive, giving space to “empty” spots, but the composition still prevails. Nóra Teplán is not afraid of this void; nothingness, the nihil is actually one of the central themes of her works. Her compositions are strongly dichotomic: along with the aforementioned vertical-horizontal and full-empty pairs, dark-light, soft-hard, male-female, nature-culture, cosmic-mundane, near-far opposites also appear in her works. These pairs can be identified as fundamental symbols of ancient philosophies and religions, which are the representations of the world’s great building blocks in the Jungian collective unconscious. In her works, verbality and visuality are in strong symbiosis with each other. The transcendent, sometimes psychological titles underline the intuitive aspect of her works, and are understood as parts of the piece of art, not as descriptive texts for the viewer. The titles raise more questions than they answer, hence broadening the horizon instead of narrowing down possible meanings.

  The Diary of the Secret Ego series reflects Nóra Teplán’s artistic vision very well. Its starting point is the subject and its innermost world, which has some secrets, undecipherable or yet unrecognized contents even for the artist. The word diary demonstrates the demand for continuous reflection and recording. The chosen motifs return in many of the works, showing that what we see are various aspects of the same psyche, various chapters of the same story. Female body parts, hands, feet, hair are combined with natural elements. These pictures are not landscapes, they have no space in the classical sense: up and down are often mixed up, everything is floating, fragmented, incomplete, covered or mirrored. The series has a dreamlike, lyrical mood.

  These collages are the documents of a continuous and dynamic synergy between part and whole, personal and impersonal, conscious and instinctive processes. These works reflect on the infinitely rich associations of images that live within us, but they also demonstrate that our image of ourselves may never be complete, that understanding ourselves and the world around us is a process that can only be stopped, never finished. In Nóra Teplán’s collages, everyone can discover a fragment of the artist’s spirit or find an uncharted piece of their own ego."

  Andrea Berg, art historian

  link: http://cartc.hu/5312-2/