Cyril Uhnák
——Slovakian Artist——

Cyril Uhnák’s work and life is placed under the sign of circles. He was born in 1959 in Čajkov, in the region of the former Tekov county, rich in distinctive folk traditions. A direct, immediate contact with the unique phenomenon of simple beauty, aesthetic feeling and material authenticity became a defining element in his circle of wanderings and returns, in his views of the world of art at home and abroad. After graduating from the Slovak Technical University, he worked for 10 years in his field.

Since 1993 he has devoted himself to fine art. He lives and works in Bratislava. After several years of gathering and verifying experiences, he came to terms with differing themes and motifs through his creation of cycles. When he started, he worked on architecture. He studied Canaletto’s vedutas of Venice, fragments of Bratislava’s dominating monuments. This was followed by a cycle on the river Danube. He captured the panorama of the Slovak mountains in his work “Carpathians”. Through external experiences, he sees and develops his programme on the poetry and melody of the Slovak countryside. In his dialogue between traditional painting and modern painting materials and approaches, he steps on the path carved out by Martin Benka, Karol Plicka and others.

The genre of painting is static, yet in the cycle “Dance! Sing!”, Uhnák evokes some sort of cinema, drama, coloured playfulness; the rhythm of dance and the joy of movement, too. Moving coloured materials march before us against an abstract background. The rapacious, synthetic materiality of acrylic polemicizes with the naturalness and earthiness of the original.

His compositions create expressive, fully-fledged chromatic chords in the foreground, with a gradual dematerialisation of scenic backgrounds, while playing with the inversion of spatial plans. In the second part, he uses the method of heavy oil glazes on thickly textured canvasses, paying reverence to Venetian painting. Oil is a human face to a painter. It is the materialisation of the fullness and uniqueness of life. On the lifted horizon of the background, mountains float, interwoven with valleys in the summer heat. Let us be carried away by the echo of long-gone mowing songs, the tones of the elegiac, wistful shepherd’s pipe, or the song of a lonely shepherd. Hollý’s world of Selánky, mountains full of people.

In relation to Cyril’s work, I am taking the liberty of paraphrasing the name of the book “The Zest of Life” by Teilhard de Chardin. In the everydayness of an ordinary day, he wears a festive hint of the distant and recent past and “paints today’s book with zest”. In brief: his work is a polemic interplay with a destructive force. It is the demonstration and materialisation of enthusiasm for the intermediary images of the gift and zest of life itself.