Gallery Huuto Jätkäsaari, Helsinki, Finland, 2015
The Loneliness of the Traveller is about solitude and travelling, but most of all about discovering. The subjects of Michal Czinege’s examination are typically photographs of various origins or anything else convertible into a digital image, such as a drawing or text. Travel journals from the 1950s and 60s that Czinege was given by his parents and family friends when he was small are crucial in his work, and he keeps collecting them until now. He was always fascinated by their all but flimsy illustrations, in which one could see everything and nothing at the same time. The magazines were saturated by socialist propaganda common in Czechoslovakia at the time, the texts filled with fantastic absurdity.
An article from the 1960s about a German explorer who went missing with his troupe in the 19th century became an important impulse for The Loneliness of the Traveller. There have been several attempts to trace the expedition’s final whereabouts, but the mystery remains unsolved.
Solitude has many faces. For Michal Czinege seeing is the most significant form of loneliness, as well as a recurring subject matter in his paintings. Perception is at the heart of the series of “Heads”, larger than life-size portraits sprayed on canvases. The anonymous, ‘blown-up’ portraits raise a paradox: approaching the painting takes the viewer only further from decoding it. The figures are of people in the background of a photograph, usually no bigger than the head of a pin, and digitalizing the image becomes a sort of a microscope to explore and analyse them. Only by painting the figures do they turn into a recognizable form to Czinege himself.
Czinege compares the loneliness a traveller often experiences with the solitude of painting, the hours spent in front of a canvas and the painter’s gaze wandering on its surface. The presence of the studio, most perceptible as fragments in Czinege’s artists books, gains importance within the lonesome journey.
Efficiency is essential for the survival of an expedition. Just as an explorer has a function for every item he chooses to take with him, so does the artist choose every object he exhibits with careful deliberation. Bearing this in mind, even the carefully foldable transport boxes of The Loneliness of the Traveller have their own purpose at Galleria Huuto.
