Tibor CSERNUS

Early Life Tibor Csernus was an internationally recognized Hungarian painter. He studied as a graphic artist in the Industrial Drawing School then he switched to painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he became the student of Aurél Bernáth. He also worked as a lithographer apprentice at the same time. He left Hungary in 1964 and lived in Paris, until his death in 2007.   About his Art In his early years he was highly influenced by his master, but soon following the steps of Max Ernst and the tachistes, he started to develop his completely unique vision-like spectacle-paintings. The noted American painter Jack Beal welcomed Csernus in an open letter as a ‘wonderfully inventive’ painter ‘second to no other contemporary in his handling of the paint from which the shapes and visions arise’. Beal also thought Csernus had much to teach the American realists, who were treating everything in the same, dry manner. Much later, in a weighty volume of ARTODAY surveying contemporary artistic trends, Csernus’s art was given prominent treatment by Edward Lucie-Smith as on of the most important representatives of postmodernism and Neoclassicism, a reinterpreter of the old masters. Lucie-Smith ephesized that, unlike Caravaggio, Csernus avoided narrative, yet at the same time, the dramatic quality of light and shade lost none of their expressiveness. Csernus was a central figure among the young rebelling artists during the 1950’s and early 1960’s. He developed a new painting style called “sur-naturalism”, which is based on intensive brushwork, thick painted surfaces and surrealistic effects. Between 1954 and 1964 Csernus designed posters and made illustrations as well. His sur-naturalist, painting-like style also appears on his poster designs.                          Artworks of Tibor Csernus are available at the kálmán Makláry Fine Arts.                                                                                             Show more