I'm Márton Nemes from Hungary. I live and work in New York and Budapest. I think I was 6 or 7 years old, when I started to copy classical paintings from books. I was creating a world around the original composition, and extending the picture with my ideas. I was literally breaking out of the frame, which is funny because this is what I try to do still. I always had the feeling that I wanted to do this all my life.
When I sold my first piece of work, I was happy and sad at the same time. Happy because I really needed money to make more art, and sad because I loved that piece. But this is something an artist should get used to. If a painting goes to a home where people can see it everyday, that is much better for it than staying in the corner of a studio. An artwork can only function as a piece of art if there is a viewer who can experience it.
I want to paint life itself. I want to create paintings like objects and environments. Infused with the harmony and disturbance of colours and materials that can capture, keep and endlessly provide some invisible energy, pleasure and pain. I want the viewers to feel the energy. If the people who are viewing my paintings can experience a tiny part of my excitement from looking at my works, then it was worth it to paint them. The older I get, the closer I become to who I really am and therefore I can create more and more honest and deep art.
I am inspired mostly from my feelings and anxieties; experiences from my life, like a party in a techno club, or a bad date. I always realize later that it was important. I see all these forms and colours in my mind constantly. It is only after I finish a piece that I come to realize what it really is about.
Creating art has changed my perspectives of life in all ways. If you spend your life creating something that is based on your feelings and thoughts, then you end up developing your feelings and thoughts as well. It will refine your taste in everything, make you more critical, more picky, more crazy in some ways, more happy and more sad on a daily basis. I would say art amplifies life.
Creating art has changed my perspectives of life in all ways. If you spend your life creating something that is based on your feelings and thoughts, then you end up developing your feelings and thoughts as well. It will refine your taste in everything, make you more critical, more picky, more crazy in some ways, more happy and more sad on a daily basis. I would say art amplifies life.
In the 50s, people would cry in front of a Rothko. I know that it is almost impossible now because society and the circumstances have changed so much, but still I would like to achieve this type of emotional catharsis. If an artwork can keep you in the present - in that right place and right moment when you're experiencing it - then you can really go through something similar. The purpose of my work is to find this channel where the artwork can keep you in the present, and like an active meditation, can switch you off and fill you up.
