The Muralinas was founded in 2022 by Stella Koleszár, visual artist, glass artist and Borbála Komesz, visual artist. They are working to create as many colourful wall surfaces as possible, not only in Budapest, but also in several small towns.
They have already painted public walls and stairs in Balatonalmádi, a school, a kindergarten, outdoor walls in Mohács and Sátorhely, an ice cream parlour and a workshop venue in Budapest. In the street art genre, the wider space is very important, what kind of people live in the area, what the built environment is like next to the natural environment. It's one thing to paint a small house in a school yard and another to paint on the wall of a pub to match the theme of the restaurant.
The Mural Workshop and Symposion's professional director István Szántó approached Stella as a visual artist to join the mural project from 2021. The aim of the project is to make contemporary art more active in Szombathely through mural painting, and the framework for this initiative is James Joyce's novel Ulysses. In this project, Stella has incorporated the formal and genre approach of fine art into her interpretation of the plot of Ulysses.
The painting depicts chapter 7 of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, an episode of Aeolus, the god of wind.
Work title: as if blown away
The 7 x 11 metre mural reveals an organic world filled with colourful papers. The seventh chapter can be paralleled with the 10th canto of the Odyssey, where we meet Aiolos, the god of wind, on the island of Aeolian. A particular feature of chapter seven is that it is written in broken paragraphs with article headings, thus drawing out the plot of the novel, in which advertising agent Leopold Bloom is introduced to the bustling editorial office of one of the novel's protagonists. This fragility, the construction from fragments, is also a characteristic of the collage technique, and is evoked in the mural work.
Yellowed old papers and textured surfaces mix with bright, clean colours. The painting is turned 90 degrees, a key falling out of the lock in a breeze symbolizes the loss of home and the desire to get it back. The key elongates and becomes a swirling line around the red head. One story is good until you hear the other. in the seventh episode. It's a fast-moving genre of empty journalism and advertising that's blown away by the wind.
The planning began with reading chapters 7, 8, 9 of the novel, of which I chose chapter 7 because I could immediately incorporate it into my visual world. After that, the design process went on for months, what symbols to highlight, what colours to use, how to turn the image 90 degrees, what the lines and surface texture should be. I made several manual and digital revisions to the final design. – says Stella
The large surfaces were painted with facade paint rollers and the arches with brushes on textured plaster. The textures, i.e. the crinkled paper effect, were created with sponges and special rollers.
Feedback
The colours and the spaciousness of the space make it very impressive and precise in its execution, they wrote in a comment when they shared the pictures. The organisers of the programme also liked it, as they departed from the plot of the novel and painted an abstract impression on the wall rather than an illustration. Many people were also interested in the interpretation while painting.
The painting in Szombathely in the located on the firewall of the Kőszegi Street parking lot.
