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Stanisław Czwartos – Viper Tongue, 2024
Viper Tongue by Stanisław Czwartos is an intimate oil painting from 2024 in which the artist confronts contemporary figuration with historical iconographic codes. On a square canvas, he presents the face of a man with a static, almost monumental presence. Its weight and frontal gravity are disrupted by one dominant dynamic element: a long pink form emerging from the figure’s mouth.
The key point of the composition is the bright pink ribbon, which resembles a tongue, a scroll and a calligraphic sign at once. Its form refers to the medieval banderole — a traditional visual device used to record the speech of figures in paintings, illuminations and religious imagery. In Czwartos’s work, however, the banderole remains silent. It contains no words or letters, shifting the viewer’s attention from the content of speech to the very form of speaking.
The forked end of the pink ribbon evokes the tongue of a viper, giving the image an ominous and ambivalent character. What could have been a carrier of meaning becomes a sign of venom, falsehood, manipulation or duplicity. The artist transforms the act of speaking into an image of threat. Language no longer explains reality; it begins to function as an autonomous and dangerous form.
The man’s body and face are rendered in warm brownish-red tones. The figure appears heavy, material and almost motionless. This corporeal, massive modelling contrasts with the flat pink line of the tongue, which retains the lightness of a graphic sign. Two orders meet in the painting: the monumental presence of the body and the fluid, calligraphic energy of speech.
The synthetic dark green background removes the scene from any specific context and strengthens its symbolic character. The figure does not exist in a realistic space, but within a field of signs. As a result, the painting takes on an archetypal dimension: it is not a portrait of an individual, but a metaphor for a human being entangled in language, communication and responsibility for speech.
Viper Tongue may be read as a painterly metaphor for contemporary communication. In a world saturated with statements, declarations and images, language often loses its function of conveying truth and becomes a tool of influence, concealment or violence. Czwartos uses an old attribute of speech to reveal its contemporary reversal: a message without content, language without trust, a sign that poisons rather than connects.
From a collector’s perspective, the painting stands out through its intimate format, strong synthetic composition and distinctive symbolism. Stanisław Czwartos combines formal simplicity with considerable interpretive density, creating a work that is suggestive, unsettling and recognisable within his figurative painterly language.
Stanisław Czwartos
Viper Tongue, 2024
Technique: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40 × 40 cm
Category: painting
Art movement: figurative art
