It was last summer that I saw the paintings of Ida Szigethy for the firs time. I was standing in front of a window and was holding the slides up to the light. The colored images reminded me of the visit to the Graz Panoptikum with my grandfather.Its not simply the luminosity of the paintings that brought my memories back, but also this mixing of unknown and known that signaled their poetry.

That other reality that arises from the furtive moment and from memory, when both suddenly melt together, which takes on at the same time something dreamlike and realistic, is constantly present in the paintings of Ida Szigethy. They recall to me something autobiographical, they recall to me those questions about the meaning of an experience, which are transformed in me like all the images that I see.

Certain paintings seem like experiments between phantasy and reality in which inevitable logic is shattered and built together anew by an inner magnetism.

It is not my intention here to call the painting of Ida Szigethy naïve. Every creation is naïve or is not naïve; that does not explain anything, and one should not have to ask oneself what perception and thought signify for anyone.

The poetry of Ida Szigethy's paintings draws me into the stories they tell. They compel me, through them, to know my own story.

Gerhard Roth, novelist, Graz 1973