Art seeks to disclose meaning beyond things by means of objects, however abstract it gets, in some way or another it will find its way back to the world of things. Dematerialized, it nevertheless remains the metaphor of materials; a work of art either depicts or stands for itself as a palpable object. Either way, it conveys a message.
Gábor Leon Varga rounds off a summary of his work by stating, “Objects have significance beyond themselves and survive the living.” His career has this far been  a path-seeking enterprise, and he has covered a lot of ground from big illusions to magical object creation, taking his bearings in the realm of fertile uncertainty, researching the magical radiation of art by way of various experiments in material and form. Ultimately, rather than transubstantiating matter, his works came to virtually preserve/salvage the meaning of objects. He reconstructed objects in their original dimensions and proceeded to take a rubbing of them (frottage technique), conjuring them up in the form of a shadow-image. The object-imprints became ghost-images; as if they were projections of the chief components of the shadow-images stored our soul. He took rubbings of pieces of furniture (camping chair and table), then cars (Trabant, Mini Special), and even a tram and a trolleybus. All in their original dimensions, in a highly painterly way. The specific Hungarian environment existing in the picture gallery of the local’s mind comes through clear, together with the noises and smells of the squalid industrial estates, hangars and engine-sheds. A cellar with dilapidated furniture, a snack bar with wood lattice chairs, the shoddy weekend house on Lake Balaton. Naked, undisguised, second-rate reality. Leon has called it though he is aware that by taking stock of the relics of our Eastern European milieu he conveys the melancholic atmosphere that enshrouds and connects all of us, Hungarians. There is no escape from it: this fertile decay, the beauty of transience, the battered condition has sunk in. The battered objects will survive us, but objects, too, will perish. Leon has told me that he accompanied two vehicles, a withdraw tram and a trolleybus, on their last journey. While he took the rubbings he must have formed a secret personal bond with the vehicles; you can certainly tell from his works, from the fact that the objects become persons and are obliged to make confessions. For me, these imprints bring to mind tangles of problems, the passage of time, memories deep-deep down in our mind, moody, bitter allegories. The imprints of fish are both dead bodies and sacraments. The rubbing taken from a fish is at once sacrifice, symbol, emblem-beautiful in itself. All of these works highlight the concrete and the metaphor, the real and the unfathomable. They preserve a condition but involve a sense of loss, like a death-mask. They are fossils which evoke memories in us and shadow-images which help to reconstruct our past, to make imprints of decaying archeological finds. The job Leon Varga sets out to do is not preservation, but prophesying the future by pointing out the objects that will once become past memories. On closer inspection, the paintings reveal his superb treatment of paint as a medium, moderate tones and layers of colors. It is soul, not imprints, of objects that these paintings preserve. They create life stories, our own life stories, shaped and continued by objects.