Rückenfiguren, 2024-ongoing
The images in the Rückenfiguren series were obtained by re-training generative AI models with scanned and digitalised photographs taken from the artist's family albums. Assuming signs of time such as scratches and dust, as well as the imperfections of amateur analogue photography, as semantic elements of their own language, the new generative models yield a peculiar aesthetic, a hybrid between the encyclopaedic visual knowledge - present in the initial model - and a circumscribed, emotionally dense visual paradigm. The series takes up from Romanticism the motif of the Rückenfigur, a figure seen from behind and turned towards a mysterious elsewhere, and unattainable themselves. The portraits as Rückenfigur play on this limit between recognisability and unrecognisability of the subject, on the gap between a data-grounded statistical elaboration and an arbitrary imaginative act.
Exhibitions:
2024 Remote, NUB Project Space, Pistoia, curated by Condylura
Pictures:
1-5 Portrait of the mother as a Rückenfigur, 2024, inkjet print on cotton paper, 60x120cm, installation views at Remote, NUB Project Space, Pistoia
Ph: Francesca Lenzi
