Modellers Tibor Csernus

Modellers is one of Tibor Csernus’s outstanding works from his surnaturalist period. The term surnaturalism – in relation to Hungarian painting in the 1960s – was used in connection with Csernus’s special painting method by the young artists gathered around him (László Lakner, Ákos Szabó, László Gyémánt among others) . The visual details he created with elaborate naturalism were “fractured” by the artist with his own scraping method which, with the tachistic elements and the picture plane’s closed nature, resulted in a surrealistic impression. He got acquainted with this technique – through Simon Hantai among others – during a study trip to Paris between 1957 and 1958. The artist was passionately devoted to the theme of flying and had been building airplane models of his own design from a young age. He dedicated this work to the memory of the pilot György Endresz, who flew across the Atlantic Ocean in record time in 1931.