Santos
2026
Oil on Canvas
This series of paintings are hybrid, made by machines and my own hands, yet the authorship remains unified. I create both the code and the gestures. These works do not seek to replicate reality, but to evoke it through a complementary dialogue between systems, materials, and ways of seeing.
Much of my work, and in many ways myself, emerges from an ongoing act of translation: a movement between disciplines, cultures, and ways of seeing.
In painting, one learns to locate fixed points: measured intervals of the face, the alignment of features, the geometry that underpins resemblance. These coordinates form a scaffold, an inherited cartography of observation.
In this series, I shift the burden of mapping onto the machine. By delegating the task of measurement, I allow myself to dwell more fully within the territory of perception.
This practice places the work within 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 appropriate novel technologies and subvert them to the transcendent job of art making.
My own exploration with drawing machines began in 2014 with the construction of a custom wall plotter for Skylines. Since then, I have approached the machine and digital tools as collaborators capable of extending my ability to see and create. For this body of work, I developed custom software that employs computer vision to analyze images, translating their latent structures into vector paths that are drawn by a plotter onto a primed canvas.
Once this cartography is laid down, I return to it with oils and brushes. Freed from the obligation of precision, I enter the painting as a space to inhabit rather than to describe.
