In ten answers, painter Máté Orr reflects on HYPERMADE on psychological power dynamics, medieval perspectives, and the quiet tension between observation and being observed.
HYPERMADE: Dear Máté, your work often presents moments of control and resistance, where roles shift and power is unsettled. What draws you to these psychological structures?
Máté Orr: I like it when two people can interact without one trying to dominate the other. That is the dream. But in my experience, it rarely happens. We’re all born into a power imbalance: an infant is completely dependent on its parents for survival, while the reverse isn’t true. In our early lives, a lot of time is spent devising ways to cope with this experience. Gaslighting or narcissistic behavior can be seen as childish responses to this imbalance—patterns that are hard to shake as adults.
Growing up in rural Hungary in the ’90s, there was much less talk about mental health, and I didn’t know the concepts or dynamics that psychology describes and which are often discussed today. But I did experience them. I drew and painted a lot from a young age, often creating scenes with animals or hybrid creatures that allowed for the exploration of these complex processes. So I think I always had a sensitivity to these topics, and the world has changed in a way that now it is easier to talk and think about them..
HYPERMADE: Many of your creatures feel mythological but not mythical – almost like invented archetypes. Do you think of your figures as symbolic, narrative, or emotional?
Máté Orr: I think my figures might come from a similar place as myths. Jung said that “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche.” They’re attempts to make sense of universal experiences through stories filled with powerful imagery. This can be seen as a way of processing highly emotional events without the conceptual framework that contemporary psychology now provides.
80 x 60 cm-oil and acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of Máté Orr
HYPERMADE: You combine flat 2D silhouettes with textured chiaroscuro. What happens – in your mind – when those two systems collide on the canvas?
Máté Orr: I have been working with this combination for over a decade. I studied printmaking before focusing on painting, and that training gave me an appreciation for the unique textures and emotional tones different methods of depiction can create. A woodcut feels completely different from a screenprint or the fluid marks of lithography.
When I was traveling in northern Italy during my university years, I became fascinated by works from the transitional period between medieval and Renaissance art. Sassetta, Giotto, Fra Angelico—they all experimented with what were, at the time, uncommonly realistic ways of depicting the human body and clothing, and they were beginning to explore perspective. Seeing the Lorenzetti frescoes in Siena I realized that this combination creates images that balance on the edge of realistic and symbolic. It is this delicate balance that I aim for in my paintings. The silhouette-like shapes disrupt the reading of a scene as a literal event happening at a specific place and time.
HYPERMADE: You’ve mentioned the influence of Lorenzetti and medieval perspective. What role does art history play in your visual decisions?
Máté Orr: I think visual art is unique in the sense that it preserves a direct sensory memory of the artist’s perception—something both intimate and enduring. While music and literature also capture human experience, they do so through performance or language, which are shaped more by time, culture, and interpretation. A painting or drawing, by contrast, lets us see what the artist saw, often centuries later, with minimal mediation. We’ll never know how Bach sounded in his own hands, but we can still see the fly on Giovanna Garzoni’s lemon rind, or the glint of light on Weenix’s swan feathers, just as they did.
To me, art history is less about placing a work in a historical or cultural framework. Marseus van Schrieck felt that it was worth his energy and time to record in his paintings lizards and mice in the undergrowth. And this makes me feel less alone when I find overlooked things in mundane places interesting. I look at art history as a record of how this has been done in the past.
HYPERMADE: The worlds you depict are quiet, but not passive. What do silence and stillness allow you to express that words or narrative don’t?
Máté Orr: When I create my characters, I want them to be aware of what’s happening around them. Their eyes are often wide open—watching each other, or sometimes staring directly at the viewer. The viewer is not alone in observing the painting—the characters are observing too. Everyone is at attention.
I usually make a lot of sketches and studies for each painting, and by the time I start working on the canvas, it is already decided what goes where. This allows me to create large, uninterrupted monochromatic surfaces. So there is minimal noise to distract our attention from the scenes. I think this quiet facilitates concentration and creates room for deeper self reflection.
130 x 180 cm oil and acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of Máté Orr
HYPERMADE: Do you feel a need to clarify the meaning of your paintings – or is ambiguity part of the point?
Máté Orr: What can be perceived as ambiguity I think is the coexistence of qualities that are not usually associated with one another. A duck that bites back when attacked shows vulnerability by simply being a duck —prey to many animals and frequently hunted—but also shows that it can stand its own ground by fighting back.
My goal isn’t to confuse, but to challenge automatic assumptions, so that a more nuanced understanding can take their place. So yes, ambiguity in this sense is very much the point. I am often asked for clarification of why the characters do what they do and I am happy to provide this. But at the same time I believe that there’s an internal logic to the scenes and it is possible to understand this without much explanation.
HYPERMADE: How do you know when a sketch has the potential to become a finished painting? What triggers that decision?
Máté Orr: This particular choice is completely intuitive, which makes it hard to describe. I make a lot of sketches, in the region of hundreds during the course of a year. These are very basic drafts of ideas for paintings. Usually I put them away for some incubation time which can last anywhere from a few hours to a few years. Every now and then I look through this collection and I try to see them as if they were not my own creations, and just see what makes the strongest impression—conceptually, emotionally and also visually. Sometimes I just want to paint a rooster that looks like a tiger. I imagine that this decision is informed by books, news, films, ads so basically all my personal experiences of past and present.
Once a choice is made I spend a lot of time developing the idea, playing around with several different versions before committing the best to the canvas. Usually this is when I come to understand why a certain scene stood out, what personal relevance it held.
HYPERMADE: Your compositions often feature conflict and tenderness at once. Are these contradictions intentional – or inevitable?
Máté Orr: Gabor Maté, the Hungarian-Canadian physician, says that the two core needs for every human being are connection and autonomy. The first requires the ability to be vulnerable, the second requires assertiveness. While psychology offers us the tools to understand this intellectually, art, films, and stories let us step inside these experiences. They turn abstract insights into something we can feel, relate to, and remember.
I noticed that I try to create characters that do not give in to threats, and exhibit both an ability to hold their ground and to observe the other characters with curiosity.
150 x 120 cm-oil and acrylic on canvas-2024
Courtesy of Máté Orr
HYPERMADE: What has been your most technically or emotionally demanding work – and what did you learn from it?
Máté Orr: ‘Milk’ has definitely been among the more demanding pieces, both technically and emotionally. Until the past few years, I staged most of my scenes in undefined interior spaces. Recently, I’ve been featuring landscapes more often.
But the visual language I developed doesn’t easily adapt to depicting landscapes. Capturing the grandiosity and inherent drama of a volcano using mostly monochromatic surfaces—just black, white, and grey—was an interesting process.
The main character is a tigress: powerful, threatening, but also nurturing. The two other characters react very differently to her presence on the table. At first glance, the gazelle seems to be falling prey—but on closer inspection, it’s using the situation to nurse from the tigress’s breast. The third character acts like nothing is out of the ordinary, which is, in itself, a strong reaction.
Working out the exact proportions of these emotional dynamics took a long time—and a lot of empathy.
HYPERMADE: What does painting allow you to explore – about yourself, or about the human condition – that no other medium could?
Máté Orr: When I was a child, we had a book with stills from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. One image showed Jesus’s hand with a nail placed on it and a hammer about to strike. I remember staring at that picture, feeling goosebumps from the violence of it. I probably saw the film, but it’s the still image that stayed with me.
A unique quality of images—and this includes photography and painting
among other mediums—is that the scenes they depict are removed from
time. Music, film, literature, dance—they are all consumed over a period of time. A painting conveys its message in an instant. And it does so continuously, unlike the screens that are increasingly part of our lives, which need to be recharged and switched on. Through a painting, it’s possible to contemplate something that in real life would be fleeting and lost.
Self-examination—reflecting on our own human behaviour—has never been an easy task. My characters find themselves in difficult and complex emotional situations. Observing them can perhaps make it a little easier for us to observe ourselves.
HYPERMADE: Thank you, Máté, for your time, your reflections, and your quiet insistence on looking deeper.
which oscillate between surreal narrative and pop-cultural symbolism
Courtesy of Máté Orr
Máté Orr is a Hungarian painter based in Budapest. With a background in printmaking and a deep interest in psychological dynamics, his work blends surreal imagery, symbolic composition, and art-historical references. Often featuring hybrid creatures and quiet, ambiguous encounters, his paintings explore themes such as control, vulnerability, and emotional conflict. Working primarily with oil and acrylic on canvas, Orr creates scenes that are both meticulously constructed and open to interpretation – poetic, strange, and subtly confrontational. At the core of his practice lies a gentle but persistent challenge: are we making deliberate choices – or merely repeating what feels familiar?
