Ivan Csudai — Animal

Ivan Csudai is one of the representatives of neo-expressionism in Slovakia – “new wild” painters of Slovak postmodernist painting, which as a group emerged in the second half of the 80s of 20^th century. Spontaneity of expression and uncontrolled gesture in painting were the characteristic features for him and his generational colleagues (Laco Teren, Daniel Brunovský, Stano Bubán, Simona Bubánová-Tauchmannová, Svetozár Ilavský, Stano Černý, Jozef Šramka and others). Their topics differed from the official art canon and they could not exhibit in official art institutions, however, the regime, in contrast to the older generation, tolerated them. The euphoria of revolutionary changes in 1989 made a full impact on this generation. A lot of them left the world of arts shortly after the changes for the extremely attractive business of advertising and commercial art and most of them did not continue in their art career more significantly. Csudai evolved seamlessly from his “wilder” beginnings and started to create works where he transfers motives and symbols from popculture or symbols carrying a sense of nostalgia to combine and modify them in a computer and consequently put them on a canvas.  The result is a flat painting of clean shapes and compositions where the constellations of signs are developed in several planes.

The art work “Zviera” (Animal) belongs to a series of silk screens, which he created at the beginning of his career. Thanks to the technique which was carefully selected (multi-color silkscreen) the author achieves the effect of gestic brushstrokes that make the whole scene “outlined” on a simple background dynamic. The colour spectrum is also simple, however, striking; it consists only of two shades of blue complemented with intensive yellow colour accents. Even though this animal, this beast, can be perceived only in contours we can sense its huge body under its thick fur, we feel its physical presence, its breath, its wild look and gazing teeth. The print reminds us of prehistoric cave paintings in which shamans tried to convey the unrestrained power of nature and the mystic world connected to it. In other silk screens from this period we can also see the similarity of images and themes blurring mystical, animistic, animal and religious scenes and symbols on one hand together with symbols suggesting the zeal for life, fascination with the power of nature and unlimited power of imagination. We can say that there is a similarity between his art works and the period when his works were created – filled with youthful enthusiasm, happiness from creation, unbound energy and possibly the anticipation of social changes.