ARTIFICIAL GRACE

Digital assisted image, 2025 

This project investigates how visual memory is formed, fragmented, and reassembled within a religious context, using the artist’s personal experience as its foundation. It centers on recollections of an Orthodox pilgrimage he once joined with his mother — an event experienced physically but never embraced inwardly. These memories persist not as coherent narratives but as scattered impressions, emotional tensions, and partial images that resist direct reconstruction.

The black-and-white component functions as a pseudo-documentary reconstruction of these fragments. Generated through algorithmic interpretation, the images become simulacral documents — photographs that resemble evidence without belonging to any archive or factual past. The algorithm acts as a mediator between lost memory and its possible appearance, reconstructing not the event itself but its contours and residual traces.

The second component consists of digital paintings loosely inspired by icons the artist remembers only vaguely. Here the algorithm does not reproduce the religious meaning of the symbols; instead, it assembles their visual remnants — color fields, structural rhythms, silhouettes. The result is a series of “post-icons,” images in which the sacred, the personal, and the computational intertwine. Rather than attempting to restore faith, these works explore what remains of sacred imagery when belief has been abandoned or never fully accepted.

The project approaches religion as a visual system that continues to operate even after one exits its ideological framework. The pilgrimage becomes an event dissolved into images; faith becomes a resilient visual structure; memory becomes a site of tension between personal experience and collective tradition.

In this hybrid space, the sacred and the technical coexist, and the distance between the artist’s atheism and his mother’s religious devotion becomes productive — a generative force for new visual forms. The project becomes both a return to a shared yet internally unshared moment and an inquiry into the mechanisms of memory constructed at the intersection of ritual, imagery, and algorithmic interpretation.