It’s amazing how some visions of the future can look so historic. All the spaceships and alien landscapes of 1970s and ’80s sci-fi look like they’re from the 1970s and ’80s. And in Budapest-based artist Botond Keresztesi’s paintings, the future looks a hell of a lot like the ’90s.
These big, soft focus, airbrushed canvases are full of biomechanical creatures in rocky, inhospitable landscapes. Faces are melded with gears and metal, the corporeal meets the mechanical, meat meets machine. Gleaming jewels dot the mountains behind, alien eyes peer out of the sky. This is the future filtered through lo-fi 1990s video game aesthetics, laced with allusions to traditional Hungarian ceramics and decorative kitsch.
I don’t think the work is doing anything that hasn’t been done better by sci-fi over the past 50 or 60 years – ideas of bodily transformation and the impact of technology on the human form have been standard sci-fi fare forever. But the gentle, 16-bit aesthetic of giant metallic hybrid forms in bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape is neat and satisfying, as if Japanese bike brand Shimano was tasked with building a cyber-human that looked a bit like a glazed pot. It’s not that deep: the future’s coming, and when it gets here it’ll feel weirdly, uncomfortably familiar.