Shenanigans, 2010

Oil on torn-edged recycled fiberboard – 138 × 232 mm

Bónyai Barbara’s 2010 painting Wild Boar is a multilayered, ironic, and mythopoetic paraphrase that constructs a unique, permeable world at the intersection of the Hungarian origin myth, the visual language of Scythian gold artifacts, and the fragmented linguistic play of contemporary digital culture. Executed in oil, the work depicts three wild boars whose composition deliberately references motifs found on Scythian gold plates, albeit in distorted and overpainted form. The torn-edged recycled fiberboard serving as the panel channels the tradition of Arte Povera, conceptually emphasizing the motifs’ timelessness and their layered, recycled meanings.

Here, the wild boar functions not merely as a totemic animal: within Scythian culture, the wild boar symbolized warrior virtues, survival strength, and primal, earthly vitality. Parallel to this, in the Hungarian language, the archaic name for a sow is “emse” – linguistically distinct from the personal name Emese, yet opening an ironic and playful associative space. In the Emese myth, the primordial mother impregnated by the Turul bird embodies the genealogy of the Hungarian state’s foundation. The painting’s concept disruptively wedges itself into this sacred and national iconography by confronting grotesque yet deeply archetypal contradictions through the linguistic shortcut equating “wild sow” with “emse.”

The palette of the three boar bodies – earthy greens, whites, pinks, and reds – merges archaic and pop-cultural layers. The fractured blue background seeps through the animals’ forms, generating an aura-like, almost glitch-inspired hovering effect. Inscribed across the surface is the phrase:
„M’ér’ nem jön sose sms-be emse mese 2010-be se?”
“Why never comes the Emse tale in an SMS, not even in 2010?”
This functions as a contemporary folkloric mantra: a linguistic game, an ironic rhyme, and a cultural critique rolled into one. It situates folk tale tradition within the realm of digital text messages, blending the profane animal body and the mythical origin narrative in the compound “emse mese.” This wordplay reflects the poetic absurdity inherent in the Hungarian language and poses the question: is there still room for origin myths in the fragmented world of SMS and memes?
The Popicon cycle’s defining aesthetic strategy – the collision of popular visuality and philosophical content – is fully realized here on linguistic, cultural, and iconographic levels. The boars simultaneously serve as archaic totems and metaphors for contemporary media phenomena; the painting becomes a dual reflection wherein past myths and present cultural panels distort and mirror each other.

Wild Boar is thus not merely an animal depiction or a system of symbols: it is a conceptual satire and, simultaneously, an experiment in crafting a new origin myth – rendered in digital language through the medium of oil paint.