Series of paintings, various sizes and techniques, 2016
MATIKETO focuses on the relationship between universal images and personal identity. When a person moves abroad from their homeland, life turns all at once into a foreign-language movie that lacks subtitles. Interpretation is based on things altogether different than before, and imagination seeks to fill in the gaps when one’s own cultural background is no longer enough to interpret everything. Details and nuances become more meaningful, attention is drawn to gestures and visual landmarks, but decoding images is also different than before. Everyday things that used to go unnoticed now take on disproportionately great significance.
In the series MATIKETO (Finnish for Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu), Michal Czinege seeks to articulate this feeling as a visual experience, using pictorial elements from his surrounding everyday life as a starting point. The focus is on finding a moment that balances between the familiar and the unrecognizable. In the paintings, however, details merge into an abstract whole and the possibility of an unambiguous interpretation disappears again.
“Just before I left Slovakia and started my journey, I painted The Loneliness of the Traveller for an exhibition in Helsinki in 2015. I was aware of the upcoming move when I painted the series, so in retrospect it’s easy to see that I was already preoccupied with the idea of the lonely traveller. After some time I settled down in Nurmes, Finland, and MATIKETO reflects that transtition. The series is comprised of visual fragments of several places, especially the many vacant buildings in Nurmes where I’ve had my studio since coming here.”
