The work around which was assembled this exhibition is the oldest existent work of Miklós Onucsán: The Oil Clocks (1977).
The Oil Clocks begun with the dripping of a drop of oil on a sheet of paper, followed by the precise drawing of its outline: as the initial impregnation surface of the oil continued to extend slowly, the artist marked, from time to time, its new outlines, together with some notes – personal remarks or, more often, the precise time. The process ended after a long time from the initial dripping, then when it seemed that the oil ceased its expansion by exhausting its resources, a moment represented in the last drawn outline of each one of the stains. There were many of these processes taking place and their results are as many “clocks”, each one of them showing a conglomerate of heterogeneous times: times that are partially diluting within each other as much as for their print to remain recognizable. The first one of these times of The Oil Clocks is “the objective time”: the undefined dimension according to which it is arranged the irreversible succession of the phenomena. The objective time appears here in the physical encounter of the matter of the oil with the matter of the paper and their slow permeation. This is a time to be noticed only after it passed. The second time registered by The Oil Clocks is the subjective time: that time that is pointed out by the artist’s moments of observation and by the drawing of the outlines of the oil spot’s spreading. This is the filter-time, the personal measure through which the perception and the construction of the real are circulating. The third of The Oil Clocks’ times is the conventional time: the system of measurements that indicates “the exact hour” and which it is meant to regulate the first two times in order to make way for the civilization and its artifacts. This is a time of the numbers and of the precision that abstractly minces the duration up to its smallest particles, a time suspended between the undefinedness of the objective time, the precariousness of the personal time, the common urgency to name them, and the utopian attempts to synchronize them. The oil stain continued to enlarge its surface (during few decades) even after the moment when the artist’s decision concluded that the expansion exhausted its resources, because, at each one of The Oil Clocks, their present surfaces of the stains outgrow the last drawn outline. Here lies the fourth time of The Oil Clocks: the time of history. This is the time of Angelus Novus, with its face turned to the past – objective, personal, conventional -, to the process whose images are bringing to light the margins of assessment for its own error. What The Oil Clocks are succeeding to sum up is an iconography of the deposited time, of the archive, of the banal moment that, by transgressing a series of specific patterns (more or less visible), it becomes impregnated with meaning and it is called for to help in rememorating and revisiting its own course – a form of critical monumentalizing.
The works gathered in the MO(NU)MENT exhibition are operating, each of them, with one or many of the conceptual frames synthesized in the images of The Oil Clocks, because they are working with the accidental, with the temporality and memory, and with measurement and historicity, within different visual and processual settings and in different referential contexts, while in the same time keeping visible their mechanisms for processing and questioning their own actions.

Mădălina Brașoveanu

Special thanks to: Zsolt Ambrus, Mónika Barta, Attila Bács, Előd Izsák, Arnold Lungu, Arnold Musát, Mihai Pop, Fanni Sütő, József Zavicsa