Stories in Wilderness – 6 1939 - 1940

Curator: Today we are examining "Stories in Wilderness – 6", an ink and pen drawing rendered between 1939 and 1940 by Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan. Editor: Immediately, the texture grabs me. There's such intense hatching to describe mass and shadow—the oppressive darkness of the jungle really comes through. It's…unsettling. Curator: The formal strategy of dense line work does establish an unsettling mood, heightening the stark contrast between light and shadow. Look closely, and you’ll see how Kubínčan’s expert handling of ink generates a tangible, almost suffocating density. Editor: And that lone figure sitting atop...whatever that mound is...shooting a gun. Who is he? What’s his story? The colonial overtones are palpable. Here he is, this white figure, violently imposing himself onto an unfamiliar and quite hostile environment. Curator: He might be a surveyor, a hunter, or merely a figure symbolic of intrusion. Note how Kubínčan deliberately positions him above the indigenous creatures—crocodiles and hippos—crafting a visual hierarchy, with the figure’s weapon defining the terms of encounter. Editor: Exactly. This is a very violent encounter. Is this journey of "discovery" merely another excuse for destruction? Consider the date, the late 1930s. With looming war and expanding imperial power, this work speaks volumes about the anxieties of the period. What stories of exploitation are etched within that wilderness? Curator: It's worth observing how the realism of the creatures is contrasted with the almost abstract rendition of the environment around them. This disjunction makes for an oneiric composition. Editor: Precisely, we're pulled into a landscape that exists as a battlefield as much as it does as an imaginative rendering of both an exoticised place, and the tension between those who seek to dominate nature versus the ones living within it. Curator: A compelling interaction between abstraction and realism. Editor: An effective composition using shadow and textural density to expose some harrowing narratives about nature, discovery and ultimately, control.