GRESA Márton

Márton Gresa’s painting navigates the labyrinth of 21st-century visual culture: it simultaneously explores the medium of painting and reflects on its legitimacy in an era where originality has been replaced by copies, meaning by algorithms, and reality by simulations. His practice serves as an analytical imprint of the overproduction of visual content, the dominance of media, and the conformism of consumer society. In his works, traditional and digital techniques, material and immaterial cultural codes dissolve into one another, forming a distinctive visual language rooted in post-internet aesthetics. His art can be interpreted, ironically, as the landscape painting of the 21st century—depicting the fabric of modern myths, illusions, and longings that shape the world we live in.

Gresa’s creative thinking may also be seen as a new form of the ready-made: his digital collages are built from identity configurations born in simulated realities. Yet his visual rhetoric, drawn from contemporary life, is never self-referential—it offers an ironic response to our shared condition: “this is you, this is us, this is me.” The aesthetics of his paintings not only capture the visual symptoms of the zeitgeist but also address their mechanisms and their power to shape society. While his visual references often evoke applied graphics or poster art, his works are, in fact, situated at the intersection of new media art, post-internet culture, and pop art. In his practice, digital aesthetics, post-internet visuality, the iconography of pop culture, and the language of graphic design merge through an ironic and critical lens.

The young artist’s essential oeuvre can be dated from 2021. Rather than working in series, he tends to develop distinct creative periods. A significant milestone in his career was his solo exhibition Fake it till you make it (2022) at Artkartell Projektspace, where he addressed the rise of media arrogance and the spread of misinformation—deep fakes and fake news—that intensified during the pandemic.

By 2023, Gresa’s artistic evolution led him toward more experimental and hybrid solutions. His works took on new forms: instead of traditional canvases, he began painting on plywood, employing CNC cutting techniques and creating almost sculptural, intermedial picture panels in which the aesthetics of digital rendering take physical form. The works presented at his exhibition I live in your eyes (acb Attachment, 2023) focused on the relationship between viewer and image: the painting becomes not merely a spectacle but a relation that activates only through the gaze of the observer. At this stage, the artist no longer produces mere images but constructs visual contexts built upon the perceptual paradoxes of post-internet culture. His paintings are consciously too beautiful, too precise, too familiar—they operate according to the logic of consumption while simultaneously questioning it.