SORCERY WITH THE DISTORTING MIRROR
(text from the catalogue of international exhibition of European cartoon “Meeting” in Bratislava)
by Kornel FOLDVARI / Slovakia
……Cartoons have allways been in the pillory. The history is full of the afflected who are allways blaming it that all it wants is malicious deformation and laughing at people and values which them represent. It cannot be denied that deformation is indeed one and the main means of cartoon . Intoxicating adventure in unfathomable empire of forms but paradoxically above all the evidence of looking for the original shape and of the effort to come back to the real essence of people and things. In distorted world deformation adjusts deformed and tries to uncover the substance. The distorted mirror polishes what is damaged, it enables our eyes to read undecipherable. The frog turns to handsome prince without princess’s kiss but not every prince or king is thankful for his real looks. That magical piece of glass is the key to mysteries of the thirteenth room, it enables us to enter it right in the place where the eye weakened by conventions can see only the solid wall. Just the way we can understand some truth only when it is put head over heels the distorted mirror brings the message of facts and relations from dark corners, its optics enters the webs of unsatisfactionable ambitions, complexes and bad conscience. It radiates irresistible magic of deformation, enjoyment and fortune responsibility.
KORNEL FOLDVARI
(author is a renowned Slovak writer, publicist and theorist of humour)
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