The Argentinian artist based in Madrid, started this project in August 2022 emphasizing in the question, is painting essentially human? His project, “Memories of Timothy Clarke,” seamlessly blends 17th-century classical painting with 20th-century pop culture using artificial intelligence as a source of inspiration. While developing the paintings for this series, the artist kept thinking on the meaning of these machine-made images and how to interpret them.

Dwelling on these thoughts he understood the AI was basically making abstract images implying an unfathomable distance between these technologies and our own perception of the world. He acknowledges these types of technology as technologies of vision.

“I was thinking about the impossibility of capturing what I just saw with my phone camera. There are things that simply cannot be captured in any other way other than looking (or is it remembering?).”

The combination of the machine’s grotesque interpretation and his dreamlike aesthetics adds a unique layer to these compositions. Memories of Timothy Clarke is a project about translation and navigating between the digital and the analogue realm, as the images he chose to paint are themselves translations of texts and images of other paintings. In these spiraling crossings Aja Espil manages to seamlessly combine two worlds, traditional painting and state of the art technologies.

From Encounters in Madrid, to Conspiracies at the End of the World, Aja Espil’s paintings show us a dystopic world beset by alienation, but with a glimpse of hope. Painting is undoubtedly a human endeavor in Timothy Clark’s memory.

Zé Ortigão