Santos
2025-2026
Oil on Canvas
18 x 12 inches
I write the code and I hold the brush. These paintings are made by machine and by hand, both instruments directed by the same vision.
The process begins with custom software: a program that reads the geometry of a portrait, its proportions and structural relationships, translating that structure into vector paths that a plotter draws onto a primed canvas with acrylic. Each canvas is 16 × 12 inches. What emerges is a cartography of the face, its geometry laid bare, waiting.
Then I return with oils. Freed from the obligation of measurement, I enter the painting as a space to inhabit rather than to describe. The machine establishes the scaffold; the hand releases the presence.
These portraits continue an exploration of drawing machines begun with Skylines in 2014, for which I constructed a wall plotter that slowly reveals an image through multiple tireless traces of charcoals commanded by a custom software that translate a live video feed of a city landscape into lines. This practice reaches back into a longer lineage of artists who have embraced emerging technologies not as replacements, but as liberating forces: from the optical devices of the Renaissance, to the material innovations of Flemish oil painting, to the portable paint tube that opened the world to Impressionism. Each reflects a willingness to claim new tools and turn them toward the irreplaceable act of art-making.
What the machine cannot give the painting is what the hand is for: the weight of encounter, the residue of attention, the specific moment when a face stops being data and becomes someone.
