Andrej Ujhazy might be the greatest painter who chooses his brush from drop-down menu on MSPaint and manages layers of color in Photoshop. He has an all-over command of painting software’s range of textures and colors, and their haptic effects on the screen: the jarring feel of one end of a gradient against another, lines that inscribe volumes in the bright surface’s depths, the potential of patterns to hook the eye. Ujhazy tends to take his subjects from on-screen worlds, often the massive online worlds of Starcraft or Warcraft, displacing the figures and landscapes found there into dream-like, sketchy simulations.
Good Surveyolist’s Field Manuel to The Official Services Chartered-Term C, Ujhazy’s first ebook, draws some context for his paintings of space-travelling soldiers and their uniforms and gear. They’re grunts and clerks in some futuristic paramilitary bureaucracy, and the addressees of the text, which reads like something between instructions for a video game and an army field manual. Parsing out where the former genre ends and the latter begins is as tough as reading the text itself, which Ujhazy has set in a grainy, rune-like typeface and peppered with sci-fi neologisms and defamiliarizing misspellings. The figures in Ujhazy’s vibrant illustrations have a laborious process of training ahead, but the reader does the real grind of the Good Surveyolist’s game.
— Brian Droitcour
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