In front of  Szajkó's exhibition

István Szajko arrived to the hills of Bakony from the Vojvodina Plain district. This strict ?positioning in landscape" serves the comprehension of his art. By positioning in the disappearing distance of the plain covered with fine, yellow dust, and in the forest-covered green hills of the Bakony, we can understand his paintings, the magic of his pastels, which emerges from the horizontally stretching yellow sand - dust, maybe - beyond the green nature entangled in the vertical. Szajko paints with deepest intuition, whereas the recipient becomes part of it as well, no matter where he comes from. This statement is truly evidenced by Szajko?s exhibitions organized and reflected in a number of European towns.

What can be the secret of Szajko?s so sensitively made paintings? What is the secret, which makes the recipient feel the completeness? The essence of art is, by all means, to emerge a single experience to the level of universal, in other words: to transform it. How can a sensitive reproduction of a single sensation - experienced by a single man - and its visual composing raise to a secret, yet a disclosed, revealed secret to the recipient? "I paint the sky end the land, and what is in between", says Szajko. The sky and the land are challenging universe, an infinite that can be comprehended by details - the details of the landscape. And indeed, it is the secret of Szajko's art: sensing the essence of universe focused on the actual (precise) composition of details and their prevailing motives. That is what we call "transformation": the disassembling of everlasting landscape into single moments. Istvan Szajko is one of those painters, who do not wish to compress the wholeness into a single sigh, but the other way around: as he possesses wholeness in his creative impulses (is it a talent, a creative instinct?), he is able to dismantle it into moments. His paintings bend between the sky and land with the concision of poetry, the freedom and subtle feature of association and the details of it -the motifs - foresighting the tragic features of the history of a single life.

Istvan Szajko paints: paintings of nature made eternal by the passing by of a single event, the painful miracle of being. He does it with the universe possessing artist?s impulse, substantiated into sentiments, in the intersection of the vertical and horizontal, and what we see is not an object or an abstraction, but the secret of nature, the secret of being, captured in landscape.

IIdiko Lovas