Ladies and Gentlemen, I am aware that an exhibition opening speech should talk about the artist, but now please let me bore you with myself.

One morning a few days ago quite unexpectedly I found myself in hospital lying in a white room, on a white bed, under white sheets, and from a bottle hanging on a white metal frame some sort of colourless liquid was dripping into my veins through a needle.

As I was lying there, believe it or not, suddenly I remembered that I would have to open the exhibition of my friend Antal Kerék in a couple of days.

This thought at once started turning the dripping colourless fluid into blue. A kind of blue like the sea somewhere between Venice and Torcello just after passing by the Isle of San Michele on a blindingly sparkling February noon, or on the beach of the Ligurian Sea close to Portovenere on a late August afternoon, and on this gleaming blueness spreading all over the room appeared a boat, which itself was blue and yellow and a little bit red.

Its bow was curling up and it was softly rocking on the water and it seemed this beautiful blue and the cradle of the boat were slowly rocking me. And suddenly I was feeling a lot better.

It is no fairy tale, ladies and gentlemen, – not wanting to reduce the virtues of the dear doctor Valeria – I got better by thinking of Antal Kerék's painting. More precisely on that ugly grey morning lying in that cold hospital bed, I got better by thinking of that wonderful and cloudless Mediterrenian world I love, and which is rightfully, both in quality and quantity, captured in Antal Kerék's paintings.

Because Antal Kerék obviously loves this world. Having been a lucky man he could travel around it and being even luckier he has the ability to capture it. But not like us in photographs, videos, and digi-thingies, but by photographing it with his eyes through his reality, personality, and soul, and then pour it into his hands. In other words painting it. Just think about it, this is no small task, you have to have the ability. Talent. And lots of messy details, pouring dilutants, mixing colours, finding the right brushes, starting it again and again and trying and correcting. I haven't even talked about tidying up, and trying to make the paintdrops vanish. But Antal Kerék loves these messy things and I think it is a good thing that he does, because there are these Mediterranean paintings (even if they are somewhere in the Middle East or his village, Szada). You can look at them and you will feel a little bit better. So I'm wishing you better health with these paintings.