That you have eat a snake, and are grown young, gamesome, and rampant.
– John Fletcher: The Elder Brother (1625)
“To eat snakes” meant to recover one’s youth and vigour, to be rejuvenated. The 17th century expression symbolized recovery, referring to the snake’s seasonal shedding of its old skin.
Eat Snakes!
Gallery Cin Cin, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2017
Text by Vladimir Beskid, curator:
The exhibition Eat Snakes! presents the current series of Slovak/Finnish painter Michal Czinege (born 1980). As a graduate of the Studio of Prof. Ivan Csudai at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (2006, 2011), Czinege pursued his own form of contemporary painting from the beginning – based on the introduction of blurred photographs and techno-images into painting, the selection of details and the creation of acrylic image fields on the border of figurative and abstract positions, e.g. the latest series Heads (2012–15), or The Loneliness of the Traveller (2014–15).
Earlier approaches of generating images through the filter of digital media (raster, noise and graininess of the image/screen) have now been replaced by the regeneration of the painting canvas. The exhibited series of works is based on a 17th century saying, which means overall renewal, rejuvenation and regaining one’s strength and vigour. Metaphorically, it also refers to snakes shedding their old skin – this is the process that Michal Czinege’s current paintings undergo. It is about the renewal of the pictorial field, its figurativeness and materiality through the layered nature of the painting. This personal “healing” of the pictorial surface can be perceived as a time-lapse imprint of constantly renewed old layers, the storage of memories, their fragments into one integral / imperfect painting, or the painterly reconstruction of a lost or damaged painting. To the painting itself, Czinege adds the transfer of acrylic surfaces and pigments, the overlapping of individual levels, layers and seams. Although it is a technical mirror projection of prints onto the pictorial surface, we still remain in the field of painting – we witness a living painting process and search.
This archival layering creates a personal memory trace, the restoration of a perishing image of an imaginary landscape or space. There is a certain sedimentation of time and a changing/transformation of the “skin” – the surface of the painting. Michal Czinege thus continues to develop his thinking in the medium of painting and opens up multi-layered possibilities for reading his pictorial messages.
