Church of Kecskemét 1923

Here's Kmetty János's oil painting of the Church of Kecskemét, it’s all tight-packed and angular, with a jeweled color palette of ochre, teal, and brick red. I wonder how this painting came to be. Perhaps Kmetty set up his easel right in the middle of town, trying to capture the church and the town square as one interlocking form. I imagine the artist standing there, brush in hand, squinting at the light. The colors in this painting have this incredible density like he’s squeezed every bit of pigment out of the paint tube. Look at how he rendered the roofs of the buildings—each plane has its own distinct hue. It is as if he’s trying to see how many different ways he can interpret this familiar form. You can see echoes of Cézanne in the way he flattens space and reduces objects to their basic geometric forms. But Kmetty’s got his own thing going on, right? Artists like Kmetty are constantly in conversation with the past. They are riffing on old themes, reinventing them for their own time.