Statement
Nearly all my paintings begin on a screen and end on canvas. There is a reason for that: I belong to the last generation, the millennials, that studied without screens, with paper and pen, and then had to make its way in a digital environment. The same doubleness runs through my working life. I divide my time between the craft of art and the design and development of software, the most ethereal of the crafts.
Painting
Painting is a practice as old as humanity itself. And a painter can work a surface as much as he wants; painting’s only limits are space and time. In theory those are infinite resources, but from a human point of view they are finite: the space we can take in, and the time of one life.
Giving time and space to an image that originally had neither (a scroll is not a physical place, and the time given to an image there is minimal) changes its meaning completely. In giving it that time, that importance, you recontextualise the image, and open up the chance of finding new meanings in it. The craft itself does the same work: a casual moment fixed in oil takes on another dimension.
As a general rule, the larger the work and the more time given to it, the better.
Decontextualised images
For years I found them by chance on the internet, which was already a more or less infinite visual world before generative AI arrived. Between 2019 and 2023 I began using neural networks (StyleGAN, BigBiGAN) while they still “failed” considerably. That margin of error, the so-called “loss”, produced monsters no human could have come up with. My interest in painting them comes out of that fascination. Those tools have since reached a formal competence that interests me a good deal less: because they get it right too often. AI since 2023 is boring for being predictable, in the same way a predictable conversation or a predictable book is boring. The better it gets, the worse. The so-called “AI slop” floods our daily lives with images that are all alike and have no character whatsoever.
“No mistakes, just happy accidents”, as Bob Ross used to say. What serves an artist is the accident, the singular. The software that deforms an image until it aberrates. Failure is working material.
Failure
“I have done many things because I have failed at all of them. I start from failure as one of the Fine Arts.” The line is from the multifaceted Pepín Tre, and it explains fairly well why I end up in such different techniques and registers. Genius and inspiration are comfortable clichés long past their sell-by date; what actually pushes you to try something else is the last thing having failed. Success, real or perceived, is paralysing. Or so I want to believe.