István Kemény
On the exhibition Pillow Book

Anyone who has ever looked down at clouds from an airplane must have thought that the
seemingly motionless, uneven, white surface down there is ground. On it, sunk into it a little, you
could walk, sit and lie, and look at the sky from there. And once you have realised this, you must
have thought of an angel too, because what other creature could the clouds be sufficiently solid
for.
When I found out that Kinga Ráthonyi's new exhibition would be the entitled Pillow Book, I
immediately envisaged an angel lying on a fluffy cloud, wrapped in it, watching the sky, waking
up, and then falling back to grab a little bit more sleep. To be more precise, my first thought was
Pillow Book written by Japanese courtier Sei Shōnagon a thousand years ago, then I thought of
the entire Far East, and then I imagined Kinga on her way home sitting on the plane over the
Chinese lowlands and looking at the cloud cover below. I saw her bringing carefully wrapped
red, black and gold inks, beautiful, pure white and patterned sheets of rice paper, and in her head
new knowledge about the never-to-be-comprehended nature and infinitely complicated psyche of
porcelain. This material can even be called narcissistic: you never know what emerges from the
kiln, what has collapsed in there, which statuette, shaped with utmost care, has taken on a shape
that devastates its creator. Porcelain comes out of the kiln and tells the sculptor right away:
“either love me the way I am or throw me away, I don't care. But the responsibility is yours!”
The author of the Pillow Book writes delicately but cruelly and without any moralizing about the
imperial court and her own role in it, her inner reality and the lies. Sei Shōnagon's soul is as hard
as porcelain. At the age of twenty-four, she entered the imperial palace as porcelain enters the
kiln, and out of it came a modern writer. To us Europeans, Shōnagon's sentences may seem as if
they had been written by a clever and sarcastic– I am sorry for the sacrilegious word – influencer
who had no illusions, only her culture, which is amazingly sophisticated though: together with
other courtiers she lives in the palace, in a beautiful cocoon, all day long they chat, quote poems
and write to each other... sorry, they do not write: they put their thoughts down on paper! If the
other does not understand a quote, it is a shame, for the others it is annoyance and fun, and a
sensation for everyone. In such a milieu, a misunderstanding is an adventure. Listening to a
cuckoo is an expedition. The Shōnagons could live there, in their miniature, sheltered society,
like moving, chattering, fragile, and rigid rococo angels. If you think about it, that is the way we
live today: in front of our screens and displays, locked together in a virtual imperial court.
Pillow Book. Originally, Kinga Ráthonyi gave this title only to this exhibition, but then it turned
out that the entire book, which contains the entire material of the previous four exhibitions as
well, could not have had a more appropriate and precise title because it is a unified, long-lasting,
great era of Kinga Ráthonyi's art, whose culmination is this exhibition.
This era can be traced back to an oxymoron: porcelain pillow. Materials of a fundamentally
opposite nature condensed into a single adjectival phrase. Porcelain and pillow: that is, fabric and
feather (God forbid: some pieces of foam). Even by pronouncing the word porcelain pillow
itself, you feel the tension. In order to resolve this contradiction, let us return to the angel on the
clouds. Angels are no stranger to the art of Kinga Ráthonyi: in this exhibition we also find
Heaven and Earth. Just as in Poetry Analysis three years ago, even the title She Devil designated

its opposite: the angel. But luckily for us here, we can neglect Satan, the angel's traditional
antithesis and if we would like to better understand the concept of the porcelain pillow era, we
only need the angel. Because actually it is not Satan who is the main antithesis of the angel but a
creature who complements her, for whom porcelain is soft. Let us try to imagine that. The body
of such a being can be related to porcelain as the body of an angel can to the clouds. For such a
creature, dense and heavy porcelain is mere bedding. Such a creature simply crumples the
porcelain under her head and sleeps well on it. Just to make her dream even more beautiful, she
covers her ear with a small porcelain cushion. And her the pillows do obey: they crumple and
cover her. Therefore, here in this exhibition space the many porcelain pillows, sheets, flags,
robes on display all underpin the likelihood of the existence of a force that has a completely
different relationship with material than we humans do. Not an angel, not God, not a man, not a
cloud. A demigod perhaps?
Rather an anti-angel. Anti-angels are creatures whose recognition could radically expand your
existing knowledge on the nature of matter. For me, Kinga Ráthonyi's porcelain sculptures – not
only in this exhibition but in previous ones as well – point in the direction of the world of quanta,
that is, the unknowable depths of creation. This may be the philosophical basis of her era of
porcelain sculptures.
Then, the rest is a holiday, a festival, pure magic. We are guests of the anti-angel. At his
command, Porcelain (with a capital letter!) is willing – like the empress' lady-in-waiting – to
change shape and personality: it transforms into materials – iron, stone, precious stones, water,
and even sound waves – that do not match its own material. It may change also into organic
materials: forests, orchids. Into jewellery, a chastity belt, or pieces of a knight's tattered chain-
mail. Into paper-thin light fixtures. It puts on all kinds of clothes, colours, and verses, lines,
verses and lines. This exhibition is Porcelain's bonus round.
However, it is not just a holiday because not even the anti-angel can always sleep well on his soft
porcelain pillows. Sometimes she tosses and turns half the night without sleep and thinks about
things that you also think about in your bed, in your ordinary sleeplessness. About things that
your brain keeps ticking on for hours on end: your application for a teaching job at the
university, your mother's tombstone, the cheap plane ticket to Tallinn, or on which of the walls
the ornamented sheets will hang in Fuga. You can even ponder about the schadenfreude that
others will feel for you, if your statue collapses in the kiln, or your life implodes in the kiln of
your life. Or about the half-finished house that eats up all your money, and tomorrow you will
have to get a new carpenter because the previous one ran away. And that you will build the
Tower of Madness. Or that you should become a knight errant and leave everything behind. Put
on a chain-mail and set out on a perilous journey. But then morning breaks somehow.
Each inhale is a new beginning, each exhale is a letting go.Then everything will be fine. A house
gets built at the foot of Mount Kő in Budaörs, and here, in Fuga, the Model of the New World
Order gets built: there it is. At its bottom, there is a sugar-cube-shaped block of limestone from
the Mountain; on it is the Mountain itself, which is a large, capital letter M made of porcelain on
the top of the Mountain, and on the letter M, as if it were a cloud, there is a lemniscate, a.k.a.
lazy eight – Infinity. And on Infinity there is a cross, as if the cross of Mount Kő was emerging
from a cloud. Yes, it is possible – Kinga Ráthonyi wrote this to me once – to pray in statue. And
she has proved it here and now.