Császár Előd internationally acclaimed musician, DJ, producer, is conquering a new art form, one of the first stops of which is the Vándorfény Gallery! His cat paintings are already admired by many people, his colourful works in different styles almost jump off the walls... Like cats!
Cwith Előd sászár we talked about art, inspiration and ground-breaking technical innovations in the creative world.
Your work has a rather broad, modern line: you have op-art, pop art, cubist and art deco influences in your paintings. Are there any artists that inspire you?
I've been doing visual arts since the nineties, but it was really limited to video clips or backdrops for my own parties. Plus, I never made them. So I had a visual world, I just hadn't "used" it until now. Anton Corbijn has definitely had the biggest influence on everything visual for me, and I consider that even though I don't take photos. Somehow that's the way it is.
What inspired you at the beginning to try your hand at visual arts? Or were there artists whose work made you want to create?
I started with digital collages during the pandemic. I was bored and needed something to make me feel like getting up in the morning. This was quickly followed by animated video clips, and eventually I realised I was going to use artificial intelligence for my collage pieces instead of existing photos, and this led directly to an art form that didn't even exist two years ago. Very different methods are used to make these 'painting-looking objects' - in this genre, the usual art labels don't work at all. But they don't have to, it's about something else entirely.
I understand that you make a number of works every day, and then you choose which of them are good or worthy of being put in the public domain. How do you select the images? How do you decide which ones are worth highlighting/exhibiting/etc.?
Some images I simply know what I want, and I consciously move from point to point until my vision is on the screen. But most of the digital images I create don't become physical art. Those that do, I usually spend a long time maturing before they can actually be put on a wall.
I have another question related to the previous one: Is it common to "throw out" a concept, so to speak, that it didn't turn out that way, and then look back on it later and still like it? Do you ever rework such "failed" concepts, experimenting with what went wrong and how it could be better?
Of course. If you're taking a lot of pictures at once, and you're focused on, say, making another eye for the cat, it's easy to miss something really cool along the way. That's why I don't throw anything out: countless times I've found interesting pictures in the "not-so-interesting" folder...
I see many different definitions of your art and I notice that you have many different interpretations of your work (painting, painting-like painting, etc.) You mix modern and traditional techniques in your work. You create your images with the help of AI, but, if I understood correctly, you rework the AI-generated images afterwards, reassembling them element by element if necessary. Can this process be thought of as a kind of digital collage technique?
I make many versions of each finished image, take them apart with photoshop and put them back together again. This is where my collage background comes in handy, as I do exactly the same thing in real life. But because the pieces come from the same source, the end result is still very homogeneous.
I tend to work with images that speak to me in some way. I change the eyes, the clothes, the background, and in many cases the final version is only a trace of the original image. These are then made into a museum quality print that I paint over to create the final hybrid artwork, which is not a painting but looks very much like one. An object that looks like a painting.
You also have an animation background. I'm curious to know why you chose animation as your first visual art activity besides music?
The animation technique has great world-building potential, no need to build sets, recruit actors, just put together a few scenes and voila! I really like the "do it yourself" attitude of one-man animation.
You have a cartoon series in the pipeline called Very Cool Tales. You've talked about it in several interviews, but apart from these short summaries, there's very little to be found about it at the moment. Can you tell us a bit more about the project? Do you know when it will be available and on which platform?
The series is constantly evolving and I wouldn't be able to talk about a presentation for a while. It's...
The pictures were also a kind of promo for the cartoon series. Are the cats still to be understood as character drawings (character paintings?), as an extension of this cartoon universe, or should they be seen as independent works in their current form?
It's a chicken or the egg problem of the classic kind, and I'm not even trying to figure out which came first. In any case, my pictures over the past few months have far exceeded any prior expectations, and seem to be very much worthy of appreciation in their own right.
Your career so far shows that you are an incredibly versatile, creative artist who likes to experiment with new things. Have you ever considered trying your hand at other stylistic directions, or perhaps other areas of the visual arts (e.g. sculpture)? What are your prospects in this respect?
I think I can manage with the cats for a while. There's a lot of interest in them from overseas, and if all goes well, they'll not only be seen by the wider public at home, but abroad soon.
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