Facebook is a lonely thing on Mars, 180x180cm ,acrylic and airbrush on canvas,2018 photo:David Biro

Budapest-based artist Botond Keresztesi fuses an unbridled flea-market outlook – where objects from different eras come to circulate in a single physical space – with a romantic fascination for sci-fi visions, technology and art history, with roots in surrealism and metaphysical painting. However, going beyond the strictly artistic domain, Botond’s work speaks to us about how 20th century history has left a lasting impression on his work: his practice has been impacted by Budapest’s political and architectural scenario, which still carries the vestiges of the country’s past connection to the Soviet Union. With his paintings, Botond aims to get closer to a democratic relationship between images by bringing together diverse contexts, textures and materials, and introducing metaphors that defy conventions such as linear time or a unitary conception on the world. Instead, he embraces a multiplicity of perspectives, spanning diversified sources. Humanity then becomes a disembodied presence, an arcane fragment of the artist’s singular blend of living and inanimate matter.

Annunciation, 100x80cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Your paintings mix technological utilities, everyday tools, popular icons and consumer culture with desolate lands, mutant entities and fragments of art history. How have you developed this insubordinate spirit of association?

In general I think Iʼm a chaotic person. Things are always changing in my personal environment, and maybe it also fits my whole generation, especially in Eastern Europe. Itʼs like a flea market, which I could easily describe my practice as. You can find everything on a same layer. One thing I know since the very beginning is that I have some kind of passion or focus on the specific medium of painting, and I also had some pervert interest in history since I was a child. Technology was a personal thing too, as my father who is an engineer often worked on some electronically rubbish things. I remember the skeleton of televisions, hi-fi towers at home lying almost everywhere. Itʼs not the perspective of a scientist or a techno geek, rather an incomprehensible romanticism. Sci-fi illustration also had a massive impact on my visuality, as a speculative new folk or outsider art form. Tim White is my Rousseau, let’s say.

Stoner elf, 100x80cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Paris Calling, 115x115cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Pokemon Hydra, 120x100cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

I find your work to be evocative of metaphysical painting as well as surrealism. Could you tell us more about your fascination for early 20th century art?

I did my art studies in the Hungarian Academy of Fine Art in Budapest, which according to its name was a very patinated institution, but not in a good way. It was kind of anachronistic, but one thing was very inspiring for me on this level: the art history courses. However, I’ve brought this interest with me. I was fascinated by two key figures since the very beginning. Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, which easily describes my connection to surrealism and metaphysical painting, as you mentioned. The 20th century as a reference point is also quite accentual in the country where Iʼm living. Hungary is a post soviet fragment, and the capital, Budapest, still keeps bullet traces on the walls as a memento of the revolution in 1956. The architectural landscape and the toxic political climate are based on this century. Nothing is real in this context, especially capitalism after 1990. The biggest impact on the history of art from Hungary came from the last century. Artists like László Moholy Nagy or Marcell Breuer changed our relationship with life in general.

The last futurist, 160x120cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2017, photo: David Biro

The legend of the true pearl, 120x100cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2019, photo : David Biro

Narcissus,120x100cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Despite the many historical and contemporary citations that constellate your work, the scenarios you depict look somewhat atemporal to me, rather than utopian. How do you understand time – both in and outside the frame – within your practice?

Time is a central question for me, as far as we know there is no eternal material object or artwork. Itʼs like death in our life gives you the weight of your life. My personal concept of time is like a big flea market as I mentioned before. Several objects circulating from different eras in the same physical space. Or another example is the Wunderkammer, which brought the far parts of the World together in one place. It means different levels of culture as well, especially at that time, when physical distance meant a big time gap too. Now we are living in the opposite. You can reach every part of the globe within 48hours at the most, but cultural gaps still exist. We are living in a terrible pandemic situation now, which is a good model of time and history. We are all connected in several ways, we can see what happens if one country can end up the epidemic, but the other 300 can’t. One example of the wish to equalize is the idea of Internet. You can find every information in one place; my paintings in a very basic level maybe try to reflect on this idea. What I try to reach is the democracy of images. To bring different contents textures and materials together under a common language, called painting.

Exhibition view , L.O.L. ( Lungs Of Lilies) Galerie Derouillon , Paris, 2019 Photo: Gregory Copitet

Tears of Joy, 120x100cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Exhibition view, D.D.R. (Digital Dreams Recordings) Future Gallery, Berlin, 2018, Photo: Andrea Rosetti

Thereʼs an almost complete absence of actual human subjects in your images. They sometimes seem to suggest of the presence of an absolute, almost non- human gaze exerting total control over these environment. Do you see your work as a form of commentary on authoritarianism or political dystopias?

As I am living in Budapest, one of the most far right countries in the EU, I cannot free myself under these political changes; I would say my art is apolitical. Non-human subject means rather a robotic-cyborg aesthetic in my practice, whose roots are also in early modernity. Big utopias and early 20th century movements like Bauhaus or Dada have the machine-doll fetish in common. The new model of human being in modernity, after the technological revolution, is the robot. Nowadays itʼs much more complicated to compare with artificial intelligence and virtual life, but I like metaphors such as Brancusiʼs sleeping Venus, which reminds me of the post Roswell UFO form, that easily leads us to the warehouse rave culture of the 90s. Thatʼs how my imagination works a bit. Itʼs full of almost random associations within subcultures or the mainstream. So humanity is always represented in my works, somehow excepted from the biological body, or even if itʼs appearing, only through fragments of it, like an object. Regarding this, objects refer to biology, biology refers to objects

My fatherʼs car2 ,120x120cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2019, photo:David Biro

The last emperor,120x120cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

The big cleaning,120x120cm, acrylic and airbrush on canvas, 2019, photo: David Biro

Looking at the way you incorporate gaming as well as ancient art in your work makes me wonder how fictional worlds evolved in the history of representation. Humans have always been storytellers; however, the number of ways stories can be told today seems to have grown exponentially, sometimes uncontrollably. Do you think the essence of narration has changed?

Narration generally changed with the internet I guess, it has turned upside down. I donʼt believe in linear history, rather a periodic one. Globalization tries to avoid different kinds of perspectives, which is impossible however. Nowadays, in this extremely fast society, the generation gap gets bigger than ever. I am the part of the so called Y generation, which means I was born in the late 80s, at the very last moment of the Soviet Union, as part of it, and now I am part of the EU in the same country (I was born in Romania as a Hungarian minority, but the situation is the same). In a technological perspective, I was born in an analogue world and raised up in absolute digitalization. The Z generation will never have the same viewpoint as me, and who knows whether the near future, after the Covid-19 crisis, will turn into a completely new scenario. As so many people said, history returned with this new turn into our life. This could also change narration in general.