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Martin Jonas (1924-1996)

Martin Jonas Martin Jonas (1924-1996) is probably the most significant and greatest artist of the Kovacica naive art, who had, thanks to his imagination, constructed his own painting poetry and his unique and easily recognizable artistic world. As an artist he managed in his inimitable way to express himself and artistically present the essence of the existence of our peasant and his life-long, even mystical, attachment to the soil. The cult of soil, based on its fertility, and the cult of the hard-working Slovak peasant from the "lower countries" have become, within the fine art opus of Martin Jonas, an artistic monument. On the other hand, however, the small heads and the over-sized hands and feet of the human figures - like any expressionistic deformation of forms within art - can seem grotesque, which enabled the artistic scenery of M. Jonas to have a possible merry and humorous interpretation. The distinctivedisproportionately large hands and feet of the peasants exist, in the paintings of M. Jonas, as the result of using the artistic principles characteristic of the archaic, mythical sensibility and imagination, according to which everything significant is simultaneously large. Thus we deal here with a qualitative not quantitative dimension. A man - the centre of the artistic interest of M. Jonas - is, in his paintings and drawings, a symbol or an archetype of a hard-working farmer. Peasant Besides the essential metaphysical truth about a peasant's being, shown humorously and with no pathos, and on which the whole message coming from the artistic works of Martin Jonas is based, his authentic iconography contains, in fact, an encoded erotic component and a humoristic or anecdotal feature present in the form of a free association, and this one with Jonas - like in our folk tradition - often follows after some erotic experience. In such a context we can see a corn-ear as a phallic symbol, the sign of the daemon of fertility. Here we also encounter a pumpkin as a symbol of fertility and pregnancy, in other words, a depiction of a female principle. Thus, we deal here with erotica in the sense of a higher power, the one which enabled the world to be created and to survive.