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Characters deliberately taken out of context
Janos Kujbus likes to paint his contemporaries: he lingers on faces, on bodies, on specific postures in clothes that everyone could wear.
But out of this realistic treatment of the characters, even out of this hyperrealism, the rest of the canvas is instead made of paint and nothing else: flat tints as backgrounds, characters that are concentrated on the canvas without there being any exchange between them, additions of ink strokes or felt-tip pens around the characters.
Hence, the artist likes to represent his fellow human beings by extracting them from their context. "I often work from magazine photos, but afterwards I do research to transform these photos into a work of art".
When he finds the models with really interesting poses, compositions, gestures, then the mutation can take place: "I try to create specific narratives and compose the paintings in such a way that they become more than a snapshot. The story or action can then refer to something more timeless, allowing the viewer to add their own idea, visualization or design".
It is obviously this period of brainstorming, of research, before the beginning of the creative process itself, which allows him to integrate his diverse sources to bring them into the same universe that will make his signature. A universe that flirts at the same time with that of Dali (for the general strangeness) and that of Giorgio de Chirico (for the incommunicability between the characters), two artists themselves on the fringes of surrealism.
Hungarian, János Kujbus hardly cites European or American surrealists as a source of inspiration. He speaks more about the art that surrounded him in his youth: the art of Eastern Europe, especially the Leipzig School, with, for example, the works of Neo Rauch. But the artist immediately points out that he draws his inspiration above all "from today's media, whatever they are and wherever they come from: magazines, videos, music videos, films". And in fact, it's difficult to say where his characters come from, which in any case is not essential in front of his canvases: one wonders more about what "these people" are doing, what they're trying to do than whether they're Hungarian, European, American, etc. The result is a rather pessimistic, but sometimes funny, view of our contemporaries.
SEE THE WORK OF JÁNOS KUJBUS →
As a child in Hungary, János Kujbus often visited exhibitions with his parents. He was seduced by the Hungarian painters of the 80s as well as by the Hungarian Romantic painters that he discovered in the National Museum. He was also marked by stays in Dresden, in former East , where he discovered Rubens. Raised in a cultural environment, practicing drawing and painting himself from his childhood, his vocation as an artist was precocious, which enabled him to attend a secondary school with a specialization in art, and then to go on to study at the Fine Arts School in Budapest. He is a member of the Association of Hungarian Creative Artists and the Association of Painters in Saxony, .
Several exhibitions (USA, , Poland, Switzerland, Romania, Hungary).
Logically, the artist who likes to take out the characters to give them a dimension out of time also works on installations. But he only presents them in specific exhibitions.
Nicolas Sarazin 
