Burton Booz’s CGI worlds are haunted manifestations of childhood

As a child, the Swedish-American artist Burton Booz was fascinated with the natural world. “The world is increasingly terrifying, complex and unknowable, I think about this daily, but the things that are beautiful take on a quality and resonance in contrast,” says Burton. “A lot of what I’m interested in, and try to capture, is this haunted beauty.”

In Burton’s spectral and digital worlds there is a feeling of being somewhere where you shouldn’t be, something hostile, haunted and unholy. Growing up in Sweden, China and Brooklyn, Burton’s life is split and scattered across three separate continents, cities and cultures, which soaks into his strange worlds – which he describes as “endless summer nights in Sweden, the incredible scale of Chengdu and being heartbroken in Baltimore brownstones”. Burton’s characters are almost extra-human, products of their alien worlds with saturated orange skin and strange body forms. Some of his landscapes recall Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach, a cartoonish structure rendered in photo-realistic textures in an endless sea. Spread out in a “psychological and physical distance”, Burton’s lived experience congeal into dark and dismal imagery that also evoke a sense of exploration and curiosity.

Interactions between animals and humans are a recurring motif in Burton’s work – the meeting of human and animal (or alien) intelligences presents itself in the smoggy mystery of these animated works, whether it’s an alien larvae awakening or scroll-like flags that suggest a hidden history of cryptid creatures interacting with each other. Inspired by a childhood memory of holding an octopus, Burton was moved by its anatomy and the unspoken communication between human and animal – a memory that Burton describes as now living in a “concrete aquarium in his mind”, which bleeds into his work.

To transform a creature into an image “is a kind of alchemy” and where else better to create intense, magical imagery than in CG environments such as Blender? “Injecting these elements into backdrops of decay or darkness is my attempt at reckoning with the quality of beauty I see in the world. Hopefully it’s an oblique thing,” says Burton. “I don’t feel like I want to, nor do I feel qualified, in addressing the capital A apocalypse of today. There are plenty of small apocalypses to go around.”