"Omnipotent light penetrating everything has become the painting theme for Aba-Novák. Instead of the buzzing, vibrating sunshine of impressionism he has begun to paint the blinding light beams of visionary, enlarged colour flashes," wrote Ervin Ybl on the occasion of his winning the Szinyei award in 1927. The source of inspiration for his really large-sized painting, Light was Felsőbánya (today: Baia Sprie, Romania). That is where Aba-Novák brought the motifs of the land and the typical straw-hats from, but it is also certain that he finished the painting in Budapest. While the horizontal sketch-drawing of this artwork that was also in the possession of the Dajbukát's concentrated mainly on the figures, the finished painting that was elongated vertically is filled up with the burning sun-disc in the upper sphere and below it the light radiating from it in beams fractured as if by prisms. This kind of handling of the light has been present from the very beginning in the graphic works of the etching generation, and can be observed primarily in compositions of biblical subjects. It occurs relatively rarely and late in paintings of religious themes. In the same year as the Light was made, Aba-Novák's other picture painted for the Saint Francis competition was displayed at the Religious Art Exhibition. Here the sunshine floods the totally transfigured shape of the saint preaching to the birds. "I am a naturalist, not literally, but in essence. My feet are on the ground, but my eyes are searching space, as I look upward," wrote Aba-Novák in 1928.
Aba-Novák and his friends spent the summer of the next year, 1927, in Igal, Somogy County. Sometimes celebrating, sometimes working people, mainly wheel-barrow pushing pick-and-shovel men appear in bright sunshine commonly in their pictures. Aba-Novák depicted these navvies in India ink drawings and in a number of oil paintings. The skeleton of the composition is indicated by some lines, and the straight lings of the horizon and the electrical poles are counterpointed by the pitch and toss wave line of horse-drawn carts. The human figures are no longer gazing in the sky, yet the greater part of the picture surface is occupied by the swirling light phenomena of the sky painted sketchily and in broad lines. Although the light of the sunrays cutting through the clouds is without any symbolical connotations, these pictures are good examples to show how "Aba-Novák's powerful art changed gradually toward the immaterial and intellectual. The old brutal force emphasised in the forms have been replaced by higher-ranking energies that have overcome the bodies. It is the powers of the universe that penetrated the compositions. And these powers have miraculously turned the simplest rural and suburban themes into cosmic visions."
In 1927 Aba-Novák painted several pictures of similar themes. In these pictures that represented sometimes brick-factories, sometimes sand mines, the tiny human shapes working with extraordinary energy are lost in the light-penetrated landscape, and their stick-figures sketched up with a few lines serve only to indicate the dimensions of their environment like some stuffing; in the picture entitled Timberyard downward reaching and shortening logs take the viewer's eyes to the chimneys and the figure that pushes a mine-cart at the foot of the buildings. In his square-shaped or standing rectangular pictures the artists contrasts the line structure of the composition with atmospheric light phenomena: "The plasticity of the bodies gets dissolved in the air, and the strictly contoured forms and outlines can no longer defend themselves against the blinding light. Nevertheless, Aba-Novák's light-drunkenness saturated with tensions does not absorb the colours, moreover intensifies their fire, and makes the blues, greens and yellows louder and brighter." This surely explains why one of Aba-Novák's picture that was displayed at the exhibition of the New Society of Artists held in January 1929 - in fact it was his third artwork beside the From Somogy and the Igal - was titled simply Form and Colour.
A regularly recurring motif of the Igal landscape is the sweep-pole well looming in front of the slopes of Somogy country. This particular detail appears in almost every artist's picture, who had worked here. In Aba-Novák's small painting and in Patkó's etching animals are let there to drink, but the sweep-well can be seen in a different cut and a recurring different location - for instance in the paintings of Imre Szobotka and Jenő Barcsay, too.
In Patkó's deliberately composed painting entitled Village Scene a topographically precisely fixed view of the brick-factory can be seen. Contrary to Aba-Novák, in Patkó's picture it is not the sunrays cutting up the sky like spokes or the lights breaking up the forms that plays the major role, but instead the focus is on the compact masses of buildings and trees, and the firmly contoured shadows. The light-saturation of he warm colours and the individual forms radiating from the inside create a transition between the colour schemes of the earlier landscapes and the more realistically perceived anecdotal genre pictures. The Museum of Fine Arts purchased the painting a year later it was made, i.e. in 1928 and it was presented as the newest exhibit of the permanent exhibition of the New Hungarian Picture Gallery opening in the same year.
The Patkó's last summer in Igal was in 1928. It was in this year that he and Aba-Novák - from all the artists who had worked here - were awarded a government stipend to study in Rome, which allowed them to make a longer sojourn in Italy departing at the beginning of the following year. Their styles reached the turning point by this time, but despite the change of the environment and their shift to tempera technique the continuance can still be observed in their Italian pictures; the pastel colours of the Igal artworks continued to live on in the Washer-women exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1930. The intimate rural scene of Goose Herd, the decoratively curving arches of the trees, the body posture of the lying figure are all recollections of the stream-bank compositions of a few years before, but the bathing nudes of Arcadia were substituted by a rural girl and her geese. In contrast with Aba-Novák's pulsating and radial light visions Patkó kept the compactness of the forms and the integrity of the composition clearly structured from space layers that were flexibly jointed to one another (e.g. Road Construction Workers), nevertheless his balanced and homogeneous surface treatment distinguish him from Aba-Novák's raw, greasy brushwork.
Szőnyi can be positioned between Patkó and Aba-Novák, as at this time he was experimenting also with softer, looser brushwork effects. While in 1927 and 1928 the Aba-Novák's worked in Igal and its surroundings, Szőnyi painted his place of residence, a similarly idyllic village, Zebegény, that was rich in landscape beauties; from 1923 onward he depicted in several paintings and drawings the sunray-penetrated spectacle of the Danube-bend.
The main motifs of his standing formate picture The Danube Bend at Zebegény painted in 1927 are not the broadly rolling river, the surrounding crown of hills or the red stripes of village houses hiding in the deep, but instead the dirty-green foreground that takes up more than half of the picture surface. This is in sharp contrast with the background: the hardly broken up patch of the nearby hillside is in contrast with the more detailed depiction of the distant land and the village. In the right hand bottom corner of the picture a solitary tree is standing with its wind-torn bare branches that call to mind the early land-representations, but these motifs are no longer the main characters of the picture. Nevertheless, the loosely flowing paint-patches that fill out the empty foreground do not serve to convey the plasticity of the natural forms, as Szőnyi is more intensively pre-occupied with three-dimensional spatial formations and the tension inherent in their levelled representation. The tree serves only to mark and benchmark the spatial relationships, it is as if it stood in the centre of a magnetic field, because the brush strokes are condensed into a whirlpool at its trunk in narrowing concentric circles.
In the mid-thirties Szőnyi was more deeply pre-occupied with purely pictorial problems and his attention turned gradually towards clearly compositional issues. His landscapes made in the second half of the decade were concentrated on the more emphatic demonstration of the picture's depth, and he started to experiment with new tools to achieve this: he accomplished the unification of various, plate-like space layers with the help of geometrically broken contour lines that determined the frame of the composition. In the picture entitled Snowy Danubian Landscape one can observe a typical technique that he would regularly apply in his later paintings: the motifs that lay close to the edge of the picture were not let to run up to the edge where they would be cut in half, instead, he bent them in a brave circle, i.e. 'pigtailed' them, as if the centripetal force of the centre of the picture would force them to be thus deformed. For an example, see the brushwork swirling around the tree in the picture titled The Danube Bend at Zebegény.
Szőnyi had a predilection for depicting the Danube bend not only in colour-rich seasons, but also in the winter season when the landscape offered an inconsolably bare spectacle. In one of his most widely known picture, the Funeral at Zebegény the mood conveyed by the lifeless landscape permeated the scene that was taking place in it. The well-known background sight of the Danube bend stretched as a blank winter landscape behind the stage-like foreground scene. The human figures making their way slowly ahead in the snow, "depicted almost following a Flemish pattern, despite their tiny dimensions, sunk in the sad ordinariness of their grief as expressed by just some contours and lines and characterised gently in their down-to-earth rural nature" are reminiscent of the elder Pieter Bruegel's picture, Winter now kept in Vienna. These awkward figures are no longer the self-consciously posing players of the deliberately set compositions of his early years; instead they are the living, suffering subjects of everyday events. The defiant missionary spirit was taken over by sympathising, as the everlasting spring of Arcadia turned into a dead winter.
The year 1928 proved to be a very fruitful one for Szőnyi. Apart from the landscapes, the portraits and human scenes he painted a number of large, synthesizing compositions (Fruit Pickers, Evening in Zebegény), and their series reached their artistic pinnacle in the Crossing the Danube. Again, Szőnyi borrowed the theme for this picture that surpassed all earlier attempts by its mere size from the everyday life in Zebegény, nevertheless, here "the shapes appearing in the picture are connected by a solution of light problems..." The clearly constructed structure of earlier paintings has disappeared and the blue of the sky, the mountains and the river is congested into a vibrating cloud of vapour in the blinding backlight, and thus the scene is expanded into a cosmic dimension, "as if the boat was about to slide into the white flood of radiation that united the sky and the water". In addition, compared to the Double Portrait and the At the Peak (1925) the relationship of man and the land has changed a lot. Although the simple rural people have grown monumental, yet they remain integral parts of the land, and "the environment and the human shapes melt into a splendid unity". And the following year would close this artistic epoch for good. Szőnyi put on show his latest artworks at his third independent exhibition held at the beginning of 1929, then - similarly to Aba-Novák and Patkó - he travelled to Rome on a Hungarian government stipend, then following a few months' stay, he returned home: after Italy the artistic careers of the members of the Szőnyi group were diverted irreversibly to other directions.