From the early 70s, András Baranyay’s œuvre is predominated by photo-based works and individual paraphrases of still lifes, portraits and “genre paintings”.Jane Morris (1839–1914) – a pre-Raphaelite icon – was the “discovery” and model of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). The wife and muse of William Morris appeared in John R. Parsons’s photos – studies for paintings – around 1865, instructed by Rossetti. She was the central figure of a strange and intense relationship of friend, lover, wife and model. The story was over a hundred years old when Baranyay stretched the circle in time and space: developing four photos of Jane Morris taken from a book onto his similarly composed self-portrait quartet. Technical manipulation was followed by further manipulations: the discolouring of the photo and “redrawing” it in colour pencil. In the “end product” evoking medium photos and aura pictures, the simultaneous – or at least parallel – moments of two distant events are “montaged” into one, resulting the “contact”, in the confession of an attraction, an emotional “liaison” spanning ages. Baranyai retold the theme in an experimental animation film in 1982.
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