László Molnár is a traditionalist painter. For the most part he uses the traditional oil technique. His pictures are the fruits of patient labour that sometimes lasts for several months. A struggle for forms; a wrestling match in which he tries to confine his fundamentally dynamic, expressive character and spontaneous perspicuity within limits. His endeavour – the masterful control of his skill – is based on decades of experience and discernment.

Molnár is unsatisfied with the directness of primary forms exploding on canvases, the untrammelled personal quality. He undertakes a difficult task: he would like to transfigure the instinctively discovered forms in such a manner so as to preserve, when possible their freshness and vivacity. His biggest enemy is time. Sometimes the blink of a moment is sufficient for a successful, original painterly gesture, while other times long hours prove too short to achieve a reassuring resolution of a problem of colour or form.

László Molnár is an iconoclast painter. He destroys tradition in that he does not accept the differentiation that categorizes artists into aesthetic camps of “abstract” (i.e. non- representational) or figurative (representational), a differentiation that has had a sad history in Hungarian art. For Molnár has been both an “abstract” and a figurative painter, and presently he is both. In his non-figurative period he emphasized the objective-associative tendencies of abstract forms. In his figurative period he stressed the autonomous, par excellence painterly colour and form references of “represented” motifs. For Molnár, the spheres of painting are permeable. The key to his work is the phenomenon of interpenetration: we recognize figures on pictures that appear “abstract” at first glance, but these figures can by the same right also be interpreted as the elements of a landscape.

(Gábor Andrási)