Cinga Samson’sworks inhabit and extend a painterly tradition, asserting their place within the long trajectory of figuration in art. This commitment to his metier facilitates an exploration of ideas around desire, power, mortality and transience. Weaving together the classical and the contemporary, Samson creates images with symbolic, spiritual and social inferences, drawn together by subjective narrative.
Samson’s paintings offer a complex and nuanced picture of contemporary life. He relies on his facility as a painter to render the texture and richness of his experiences, and for that representation to carry a distinct atmosphere and feeling. Using a sombre palette of muted tones, Samson’s paintings portray subjects that command an unusual autonomy and authority. As he described it, these figures inhabit a world that ‘feels secret, almost holy and distant’, coming from ‘somewhere no one goes.’