Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even video game art. Every individual is a product of their material conditions and historical context and sometimes it is interesting to trace it all back to a few specific events.

I grew up in the post-apocalypse. Amid the ruins of the Soviet Union, a newly born land of arms deals, rapid financialization,, and cowboy capitalists killing one another in public squares. In these interesting circumstances, the traditions of figurative art were, to put it lightly, interrupted.

The neoliberal zeitgeist which emerged from the ashes of the Great Project had little appetite for frivolities of painting. In art circles, it was declared that mankind had overcome and thus abandoned drawing and painting, much as it had slavery or speed limits on the Autobahn.

In its place, an aggressive conceptual art was taking the soap-in-a-sock to all other forms with what appeared to be vengeance. Nothing short of a complete reset of all truth and institutions of art. In painting, little else remained besides serious abstracts for bank lobbies, financed by the banks, abstract and serious themselves.

The world, it seemed, consisted mostly of fast loan ads, alcohol, and imaginative varieties of potato chips.

Sketchbooks were not among the commodities available in stores. I’m sure you could see how a young man obsessed with painting would find this world bleak and worthy of contempt. Fortunately. My father could bind books and made for me a few to draw in.

This is the cultural context that the art of Disco Elysium emerged from.

The next illuminating moment in the synthesis of the art of Disco Elysium was discovering the works of Craig Mullins (see p.20, image 16). His work was my first serious exposure to expressive brushwork and what you might loosely call impressionist or expressive painting and it completely blew my mind. I spent an entire day in furious thirst after this, for me, never-before-seen quality of pure distilled skill, downloading Mullins’ complete works one-by-one via what surely must have been dial-up internet. For a young artist, this was the discovery of the first master to emulate. There were many others in the years to follow, but the first one is the sweetest.

In a visceral way, what really hits in the works of Craig Mullins is how the image seems to come together without much hassle. In truth, of course, this loose brushwork and seemingly effortless manner actually take a lot of effort. In there lies the appeal of mastery, of understanding how to work the material, how to handle the brush and color. But also in understanding optics, how to accurately model by intuition and mental calculus the way light illuminates a scene. Perhaps most strikingly, an intuitive understanding of how much needs to be depicted to trick you into seeing something that’s not entirely there. It is painterly anarchy on top of rigid and true fundamentals.

It immediately struck me as the most intellectual mode of painting.

Not only was Craig Mullins my first introduction to serious painting, he’s also historically remarkable. Mullins was there at the advent of early Photoshop and Wacom tablets, one of the first to drop gouache in favor of the digital round brush. Digital art tended to have the surface finish of air brushed marshmallows before Mullins introduced texture and bravado. Any future history books on the art of painting that omit his name can be considered incomplete.

Suffice to say, post-apocalyptic conditions were hardly ideal for the study of art, and in isolation, one develops an uneven skillset. At the same time, these early difficulties and mistakes led to idiosyncratic approaches which have ended up influencing the art of Disco Elysium in fundamental ways. The autodidact must find ways to cover for their shortcomings and put forth their strengths.

An example: One prominent technique that arose from these conditions is the use of abstract flashes of color, splats of paint,and aggressive use of edge hierarchies which are necessary to make up for shortcomings and impatience in composition. Where I fail to lock down the image in its early stages I tend to use abstraction to finish it later. It is a bit like constructing when it threatens to tumble over. As far as learning how to paint goes, I do not recommend this approach - after a while, you start building tilted houses on purpose.

Truthfully, though, it is fortunate that my natural proclivities for expressive work fed so well into the subjective nature of the story told with Disco Elysium. If I were a true-blue realist, some of the wilder excesses might not have come together the way they did.

The video game took five years to make. This is a long time for an art project. Luckily it didn’t take us quite as long as Ghiberti on the Gates of Paradise. He got to witness the transition of what we’ve come to recognize as the Gothic period to the Renaissance while stuck working in a style that fell out of fashion during his own lifetime. Such are the artistic risks with protracted projects. If I allow myself the vanity, I hope Disco Elysium reflects not on the collapse of something, but instead on the tendencies of an incoming new age of more bold and eccentric works of art.

Alexander Rostov, art director Brighton, England December 2020

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