Each small object could become significant in our lives; every small naught could change its dimensions if they enclose our feelings, or when we fill it to the rim with our passions. Péter Bányay brought simple, small objects to the fore, elevating them into his art, creating an oeuvre, an allusive world that will encourage us all to reminisce. His oeuvre proves that even individual life-visions has at least one tributary that run in the same direction in all people, a basic life experience that leads towards the collective subconscious.

In his photographs uncomplicated things that oppose or contradict each other will embrace in a new harmony, not necessarily in form but in an extraordinary blend of associative catalyzed emotions. The reality of the outside world concludes, the slice of space cut by the photos evolves into a microclimate, a special arena or stage, or rather a wax museum where motion is excluded, but the view still depicts an active objective model of a world.

The various elements in his pictures are fragments of imagination and images of a condensed reality at the same time. Remembering our past conversations at the time of his formative years, he always spoke about how much the frog-eye-view of a child, when the unimportant, small objects seem gigantic stayed with him all his life. Even the small broken parts of toys possessed immense meaning.

In the empire of toys anything could happen, encounters of cosmic proportions could take place in a corner of a room or in a sand-box stuck close to a wall. Surrealistic associations spring up and appear to a child's mind as normalcy, reality. Personally, in Péter Bányay's compositions, I see this childlike innocence as it herds together all these peculiar objects and things creating simple reminiscent feelings, memory slices. Familiar emotions flood us, as we visit these landscapes of our souls; we strongly feel that we have been there.

This poetic world is not tied to one location; the viewer can animate the frozen episodes of a complicated story on his or her own inner stage as the story turns into feeling, always differently in his creations one from the other. Every person is allowed to imagine their own tale behind the vision presented, because the encounter is far from being concrete and the mystery in it anchors the spectator. That is why we sense that these seemingly accidental mental associations bring about an ephemeral angst by their silence, just as soft breezes carry melancholic feelings. Contrary to the frozen moments depicted, opposing the idea of solidity and infinity, the minute articles reconstruct life, where feelings created dominantly by the vision.

The uncanny still lifes direct us towards deterioration, towards the experience of being, they cause mood changes, they bump us from our linear time line, and we are able to look at ourselves externally, remembering our own past. An original calm and silence emanate from the pictures, they are imitating nothing. Left imprisoned in their own selves they become tiny monuments of an unsolvable puzzle of a world. The minuteness and the enormity of the world washes over each other, rational philosophies to explain it become futile. The overwhelming feelings stream up from our subconscious, our mental picture is drawn from emotions inside.

In our college years, at the early formation of his artistic cosmos, we worked in the same studio. Based on our intimate friendship and remembering our conversations as I attempt to reconstruct Péter's affinities to other similar endeavours, I try to uncover outside inspirations and ideas connected to his art. To those who knew him it might appear impossible and superfluous to summon up the ebb and flow of an introvert, shyly self-soul-searching artist's growth, but there has been not even a sketchy attempt made to follow his life or examine the development of his ars poetica. We can say with certainty, that the complex tapestry of an existence's particulars came to life based on simple impressions not even verbalized by the artist himself. There is no diary, journal or self-analysis written by the author that would aid us in understanding his work. In my opinion, obscure secrets lead him at most times as an artist, the content of his pieces suggests that his goal was to unveil the play performed on the stage in the depths of his soul.

Creating a singular introvert variation of surrealism, Péter Bányay maintains some of its conventions. The puzzling alliances in his drawings and pictures are not trying to deliver a kick in the teeth of snobs or shock us. The style of his drawing is improvisative and its weapon is the lack of complicity, the freedom of spatial unfinishedness, since dream-catching, the accidental stumbling on as a method cannot associate a determinable stylistic form. Later, in his photographs, the same manner, vision and composition remains still the earlier draftsman's approach.

In his photographs, he was not a chaser of peculiar or shocking moments, immobile object groups interpret allusive memories recreating an inner fantasy-world, as the original idea slowly transforms and ripens into a whole. Even in his early drawings an ironic view of the world dominated, but its absurdity dissolved in its poetic way of interpretation, influenced also by the various graphic art methods of reproduction. His graphic art flourished in a grotesque narrative cosmos. Stylization later made its visualizations more archetypical, even turning an active, living human into an impressionistic being. This approach of simplifying took him to a torso-like figurization, where the live object-character is moved as a puppet, or it turns into a broken remainder of a sculpture.

Péter Bányay was fascinated by the naive arts, he spoke at length about the magical moods of a biographical film about Niko Pirosmanashvili, the Georgian painter. He was captivated by puzzling or unsolvable stories and surrealist films influenced him greatly. There was a time when he kept a journal of his dreams, after waking up analyzed and recorded his dreams. We can safely assume that the subconscious greatly influenced his work as an artist. He realized that the subliminal visual world has an enormous power of compression. In his method of working the importance of the improvisative search and the spontaneous summoning of form bear symbolic meanings. The stumbling on, the instinctive creation of the visuals, this automatic way of symbolism is able to uncover the forgotten, oppressed truths, therefore it needs self-knowledge and ingenuousness. That way of creation supposed, that by the weird and many times bizarre associations presented we will be able to see the world in a different light. Maybe similarly to the Zen-Buddhist scheme where in a paradoxical story, a twisted logical confusion will enlighten the apprentice, and that can be followed only by silence, because the significance is not viable if put in words.

I have to mention the importance of Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell when speaking of Péter Bányay's work. He continued the surrealist collage technique of Max Ernst, which after a radical Dadaist start has grown into an absurd, but lyrical dream world of woodcuts. Joseph Cornell's "magical boxes", as if miniature shop windows or trophy cases were filled with minute objects, talismans and relics, suggesting deep collective secrets. This world is also akin to the paintings of Pierre Roy, wherein, small knick-knacks, papier-mâché castles, plastic flowers, small glasses – and I could continue endlessly – are arranged as if a child would do it, or a young girl would organize her collection of fetish-like souvenirs, in a symbolic ensemble of her hopes and dreams.

The influence of the object-collage, the "boxing", the various photos and cuts of the surrealist predecessors is easily identifiable in Péter Bányay's work. He also created three-dimensional collages by using pictures positioned in between glass panes. All these methods became special and individually his when he started to use photographic art as his main building block. The accidental composition, the stumbling on technique, the object collage and the photographic montages has been used as tools of his art but the fine artist's manner of approach to a subject stayed constant and the preparation of the subject also changed the final product, the photograph. Therefore, on the photos we can find sensual surfaces, fractural effects that invite our touch. Next to the erosion and worned-out objects enlarged surfaces are giving a place to aerial silhouettes, in other times around the sturdy, expanded objects translucent, shapeless shadows are floating.

The continuation of a childlike vision of the world is a magical act of intuition. The lost objects turn into relics, by enlargement they acquire new meanings, by intellectual osmosis they became the shrines of secrets. It is the poetic transformation of the world, serving the ethereal universe of the inner senses.

József Gaál