A Stage for a Drama: Muhju's Renaissance 2.0

By Justin Wetch

Last year Muhju made a piece called The Artist. The image is a gigantic blank canvas with all his recurring figures arranged at the edges, and in the middle there's a small artist scratching his head. He says it's the truest portrait of his practice he's ever made. The figures are already real to him. 

"It is a stage for a drama," he says.

Ask him to describe the work itself and he lands on "a neoclassical inspired art style that uses 3D in a painterly style. Fashion inspired, renaissance inspired, fantastical, and a bit dramatic."

He places the figures one at a time, picks the camera angle early, and sets a main light, a secondary light, and a rim light from behind, a setup borrowed straight from theater. He cheats wherever he needs to. The lighting on a figure in the foreground doesn't have to obey the same physics as the lighting thirty feet behind. Painters have done this for centuries. He's just doing it in 3D.

Once you understand the work as a staging job rather than a depiction job, the rest of his project comes into focus. The horned angels and gilded saints and Greek columns aren't subjects. They're a cast.

Muhju was born in Switzerland to an Italian mother. The family spent a year in the US when he was six and then came back to Schaffhausen, north of Zurich. His mother is a serious art collector with a focus on neoclassical and Renaissance painting from the 1500s. He grew up disliking the aesthetic, the way kids dislike most of what their parents love. Meanwhile, he and his brother were inhaling the great Japanese comics, Berserk and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and One Piece, inventing their own pirate crews and drawing their own versions until the worlds in their notebooks rivaled the worlds on the page.

"Art is not only something visual or something conceptual," he says. "I think art is all in all, always a story that we're telling each other."

Two visual lineages. Neither one taking precedence. The Renaissance figures on his mother's walls and the manga panels in his bedroom quietly stopped competing for the same real estate in his head.

In Switzerland, only a small slice of students go to university. Most do an apprenticeship and specialize early. Muhju didn't know what he wanted, but he knew he was wired to make things, so he asked himself which everyday job offered the broadest creative spectrum. Architecture won. He went to ETH Zurich.

Before he could finish the degree, mandatory civil service interrupted, the alternative to military service in Switzerland. He spent six months in a nursing home. The day the city renovation team came in to talk about updating doors, he couldn't shut up.

"Look, you're doing it wrong, because you don't want the feel of a hospital. You want the feel of a living room."

The CEO overheard. Told him that if he had so much to say about it, he could design the concept. Muhju ended up designing 84 doors for that nursing home. It was his first built work. He was on a pause from architecture school and he'd just bullied his way into a commission.

"I'm an architect by day and an artist by night," he says, "and I'm struggling with the duality of it, and that's also part of what makes it so exciting."

The day work is schools, hotels, public buildings, apartment complexes. They're currently converting his firm's own office building into apartments. At his scale, architecture has no visual style. Style is reserved for high-tier design firms doing private villas. Architecture, for him, is problem-solving.

What architecture taught him: how to sit at the work for hours until it's done, how to design pipelines that survive software crashes, how to take criticism without putting himself "too much inside the art." And one cognitive habit that turned out to matter more than the rest combined. An architect's job is to look at a 2D plan and instantly imagine it as a 3D space, then translate back. Switching dimensions is the muscle.

The night work uses the same muscle in reverse. He looks at a Renaissance painting or a fashion photograph or a still from a ballet, and he models a 3D mannequin posed exactly like the figure. The 2D image becomes 3D space, and from there, after he stages it, becomes 2D image again.

A piece begins with a sketch that isn't supposed to look good. Its job is to carry information. From there he moves directly into 3D, blocking out the biggest dominant shapes first because, as he puts it, a painting has two layers. There's how it looks from far away as a whole, and there's the second layer up close, "the paintings inside the painting."

He builds the macro layer first. Cinema 4D and ZBrush for the figures, ArchiCAD or Rhino for hard-surface architectural elements. He picks the camera angle early and commits, then poses every figure down to the finger, models in the smaller details, sets the lights, and renders in Octane. "Octane Render is the best when it comes to high polygon count," he says. A single render can take ten hours or two days.

That's only the first half.

The second half is digital painting over the render in Photoshop and Procreate. He paints in textures, refines edges, and pushes the image toward the painterly finish that's become his signature. He calls the technique something he's "trying to invent" and "constantly evolve."That constant evolution is the core of what he calls Renaissance 2.0.

He has a defense ready for why he cares so much about technical difficulty. "If it doesn't take any learning curve or anything elaborate to do it, anyone can replicate it. And if anyone can replicate something, it's not something special anymore."

What he wishes more people understood is that this isn't AI-made. Every figure was modeled and posed and lit and rendered and then painted over by a human across weeks or months. When his work goes viral on a phone screen, the comments fill up with people asking what model he used.

"Art is not really made for a doomscroll timeline," he says. "It's made for a gallery. Screen's gone, and you walk in, and you spend some time with the piece."

Muhju's working thesis is that art has always been the technology by which humans tell each other the same handful of stories across centuries, and his job as an artist is to take a place in the lineage and tell the stories again. He builds the case from the cave forward.

"Before there were books, you know, we were sitting in a cave around the fire telling each other stories. And then the stories we told each other, stuff that you and me went through, we will paint it on the cave wall, and we will remember it. And then maybe it becomes like our signature in our tribe, and then it becomes religion and culture."

He uses St. George and the Dragon as his proof. The Christian story of the knight defeating the dragon and saving a city has been depicted in hundreds of paintings across a thousand years of art history. Type the name into Pinterest and you'll see versions of the same scene from every century since people started painting it. Walk into a kid's bedroom today and they'll know the same story through a different costume, a Disney princess waiting for a prince, an action movie about a hero rescuing the city.

His other example is Achilles. The character has been depicted in paintings for centuries. Right now, he points out, many people know Achilles as Brad Pitt.

"The way the story gets told changes," he says. "The story doesn't."

The original Renaissance, in his reading, didn't just revive antiquity. It remixed it with new tools. The Doric column from ancient Greece had no base; in the Renaissance it got one. The round temple had no dome; the Renaissance gave it one. The architects broke the rules they were honoring and used better techniques to do it. That's the point of Renaissance 2.0. Not replication. Same lineage, new tools.

“Renaissance 2.0 is about exploring the newest tools available and putting them together to advance the technique of what it means to make art. It is not a style label. It is a creative philosophy: the same way the original Renaissance architects broke the rules they were honoring by using better techniques, Renaissance 2.0 pushes the craft forward with whatever tools the current era provides.” He says.

The current commission would have taken three years to paint by hand. In 3D it'll take three months. He doesn't separate Asian and European visual traditions either. "Because we live in a global decentralized world, they do not have to be separate anymore," he says. "The boundaries start blurring." His work holds horned figures from Christian iconography, columns from Greek architecture, bodies posed from fashion photography, drama borrowed from Japanese manga.

"Part of this army of artists telling that lore of humanity," he calls himself. The lore continues. The tools change.

Muhju's last major project was Aurum Maledictum, Cursed Gold, one of his many Latin titles. He studied the language for five years in school and stayed devoted to it because, he says, a single Latin word can translate multiple ways, and that ambiguity is closer to what art actually does than any modern language. Coming up: a current commission, a new piece, and a collaboration with @Jesperish.

Muhju shouts out @CodeMedici, who collected from him early. He made the man's emblem. The team at @Ninfa_io for sustained support and the way they push artists. And @maxpretends, who collected Aurum Maledictum.

Artists inspiring him lately: @SamSpratt, whose technical mastery and storytelling Muhju calls advanced beyond reach. Jesperish, deeply skilled and a close friend. And @Andrea_Chiampo, whose feedback method, sketching directly over Muhju's pieces, has shaped his practice for years.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @MuhjuArt recommends @1dontknows, @kingxerox5, and @Julio_tnim.