The Portrait in the Age of Algorithmic Artists

da | Mag 17, 2025 | 🎨 Contemporary Figurative Painting, 📚 Art History and Visual Thinking

We live in a time when artificial intelligence penetrates every aspect of life: medicine, marketing, music, cinema — and now also visual art.

But what happens when the machine mimics the human face? When it simulates portraiture? Figurative painting is called upon to answer: is it still necessary?

 

 

The Face as a Mirror of Inner Life

“Mental accidents move the human face in different ways […]. Some laugh, some cry, some rejoice, some are saddened […]. These accidents must be matched by the hands, the face, and the whole body.”

— Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, par. 282

Painting is not mechanical reproduction but embodied gesture: an inner motion made visible. Consciousness brings the face to life.

A figurative painter is not a camera, nor in competition with one (the major flaw of hyperrealism); nor is it an adversary of the prompt.

 

 

The Chiaroscuro of the Psyche

“The soft, vibrant, mobile chiaroscuro ripples the surface of the oval face, revealing both a perfectly rational clarity and an anxious, sensitive tension.”

— Giulio Carlo Argan, History of Italian Art, p. 525

The face is judgment, ambiguity, tension between inner and outer. AI-generated images do not engage with this complexity: they appear complete, yet sterile.

That’s why they feel so empty to those educated to recognize true beauty.

 

 

What AI Cannot Emulate

I came across an article by Antonella Braccia (Tony Arms) on LinkedIn, who writes with striking clarity:

“This is the difference AI cannot emulate: the ability to trigger authentic emotions and human connection through imperfection and the unique character that only human intelligence can give to a work of art.”

— Antonella Braccia (Tony Arms), LinkedIn Pulse, September 2, 2024

Read the full article

Figurative painting is not outdated: it is resistance. Resistance to algorithms that flatten, to simulations that feign emotion. It is living imperfection against sterile perfection.

 

 

Conclusion: The Face as Visual Truth

I don’t paint the face to reproduce it, but to question it.

In an era of digital simulation, the painted face — the figurative portrait — is a statement. A gesture of depth in a world satisfied with surfaces.

“Creativity is made of emotions, imperfections, and personal stories that no machine can replicate.”

Figurative painting holds onto this: the trace of the human who feels, sees, and perceives the real — not its algorithm.

👉 Discover how this vision translates into my artistic practice. Explore the section “Inside the Work” to encounter the faces I paint.

AI-generated portrait created with Sora, showing a human face divided between expressive oil painting and abstract digital geometry. A reflection on human creativity versus artificial reproduction.

Figurative Paint in the 21st Century: Resistance or Revival?

da | Mag 17, 2025 | 🎨 Contemporary Figurative Painting

In today’s world—shaped by digital languages, immersive installations, and generative algorithms—speaking about figurative painting may seem outdated, even obsolete.
Yet more than ever, the human figure answers a deep necessity: to be seen, felt, contemplated.

From the Crisis of the Figure to Its Return

During the second half of the twentieth century, the figure was nearly abandoned. Avant-garde movements, provocation (Artist’s Shit), conceptual art, and the overproduction of photography had declared the painted body obsolete.

“Each generation is, at a certain moment, in revolt against the standards of its predecessors; every work of art appeals to its contemporaries not only for what it does, but also for what it leaves undone.”

(Gombrich, The Story of Art, Phaidon, Preface)

This insight helps us understand why figurative painting today is not nostalgia. It is a critical dialogue with tradition, opening new expressive paths in the present.

Many artists return to the figure as a gesture of visual resistance—not to repeat the past, but to rebuild a direct, tactile relationship with visible matter.
Figurative painting becomes a space of proximity in an age obsessed with detachment and abstraction.

The Painter’s Gesture as Presence

Figurative painting is not merely a visual style—it is an embodied act, a slow, meditative process that stands against the compulsive flow of images in digital culture.

True pictorial gesture doesn’t aim to reproduce an image, but to generate presence.
Hyperrealism, in this sense, seems like a cold response to this need—but still a technically ambitious attempt to resolve the modern tension between art and reality.

To me, the figure is not simply a subject: it is a threshold, a memory, flesh that holds a different sense of time.

This kind of resistance is not nostalgia. It is a practice of depth in a world obsessed with surfaces.

My Position in the Debate

In my work, the human body is never a neutral subject—it is a place of transformation.
I do not paint to imitate reality, but to transfigure it poetically.

I seek a living figure, one that breathes light and silence.
A painting that doesn’t shout, but listens. One that doesn’t explain, but reveals.

This is what figurative painting means to me today: not a return, but a conscious act of presence.
Not style, but critical positioning. Not posing, but an inhabited image.

Call to Action

👉 Discover how this vision shapes my painting practice. Explore my works and thoughts on the blog.

Close-up of a male face with intense expression from the painting “Enigma” by Francesco Fieni</p> <p>