Gallery Entry
Signal in the Smoke
By Cyon Flex · AT
This self-portrait begins with a real photograph of me in an ordinary, unguarded moment: wearing headphones and lighting a joint. I transformed that photographic source into a hybrid image that sits between photography, collage, painting and AI-assisted digital construction. The surrounding forms come from the visual language I use throughout my physical artwork: hand-built letterforms, fragmented shapes, saturated colour, layered surfaces and repeated geometric elements. The portrait remains recognisably photographic while the environment around it becomes increasingly constructed and synthetic. I was interested in the tension between the ordinary physical body and the artificial image surrounding it. The work does not attempt to hide the use of digital or AI processes. Instead, it allows the different layers of authorship to remain visible: the original photograph, my existing artistic vocabulary, my choices about composition and colour, and the machine-assisted transformations used to bring those elements together. The result is a self-portrait about presence, authorship and the increasingly unstable boundary between a photographed person and a generated image.