“Due to my age I have been able to follow the development of the creative career of the painter Imre Égerházi since the end of the sixties. He was always an individual and original character; but at the same time, he is an increasingly decisive player in the fine art life of Debrecen and Hajdúság. A painter – in whose work the activity of art organizing needs to be given more and more emphasis.
He seeks out dominant, distinctive motifs, highlighting them from their original gray mundaneness. It is very important that he is constructs an autonomous world that seems familiar in the eyes of the beholder. This is precisely one of the main form-factor related virtues of his art: the clean, clear, transparent, accurate, meticulous editing. The goal is successfully fulfilled in his paintings: the tangled, intricate, screaming outside world can be calmed down within the plane, and can be organized in fine order.
His color scheme is also in line with the concept. His colors and shades are varied, they unfold from each other. He usually “scales” a color family through each painting. He keeps clear of blatantly contrasting, loud and eye-irritating coloring.
In his art, aesthetics and ethics are exemplary. By ethics here I mean self-discipline and perseverance, toughness and willpower, patriotism, and humanism. To undertake and propagate in a good sense the permanently valuable artistic and historical traditions: I am thinking here of Miklós Káplár, Bocskai and the “Hajdúk”, the “golden age” and wooden churches of Transylvania, Csokonai, Petőfi and others. At the same time, he can reinvent himself, but do so authentically, not in one turn of 180 degrees.
He also appreciates and moderately enjoys the pleasures of life, its natural and sanctified gifts. He works “as the star goes in the sky”. After all, “it is worthwhile,” as the poet says, to construct an image, and thus the whole oeuvre. Things are in place today, both small and large.“
Dr. Csaba Éles
1989.