Abandoned Paintings by Bence Hajdu

Over at Designboom we came across the very talented hungarian new-media artist Bence Hajdu who has re-imagined well-known paintings such as Claude Lorrain’s Seaport with the embarkation of St. Ursula by erasing people and characters so that only the artwork’s architecture remains. The work is an outcome of hajdu’s interest in examining the pure drawn perspectives of the classic paintings, revealing an unusual atmosphere only becoming palpable after removing the figures. Above is the “Abandoned” version og Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.

I am a student at the university of fine arts, hungary. At one of the descriptive geometry classes we had a task to find and draw the perspective and horizon lines of renaissance and other pictures with significant perspective space. I thought it is not that interesting to just draw lines, so I decided to erase all the characters from them and examine how the painter really created the perspective space and how it actually looks. I saw this could be something exciting and continued thinking and working on it. After a while I found myself interested in the new atmosphere and the new thoughts the retouched pieces generated without their main subjects.”