Mart Vainre’s Artist Statement and Concept behind series ;)

The works are like a face-to-face encounter between human gestures and generative
image-making, where the two parties meet, make eye contact, greet each other, exchange pleasantries, and enter into a cautious dialogue — one in which the machine imitates what the human has created, and then vice versa, the human imitates the machine. Since the winking smiley face is only conditionally visible, the communication between the two parties has been anything but straightforward. It is rather an error-ridden, winding, and clumsy journey, where a vast amount of human working hours and machine computing power has been spent in the name of a simple task — to create a smiley face. Much has also been lost and gained in translation.

, represents the left eye in the series. Here, Vainre has started from a machine-generated visual, located at the outer edge of the work. This reference visual was created using the open-source Stable Diffusion AI model’s text-to-image generator, run through the ComfyUI interface, where the machine was asked to express its own computational nature — its artificial neural network. The artist then attempted to replicate this by hand with painstaking accuracy. Next, in the central part of the painting, he interpreted and reproduced this visual language through relief-like paint, but this time far more impulsively. Here, the artist is interested in the breadth of the spectrum — where the human at one moment replicates the machine’s output one-to-one and then interprets it freely.

. represents the right eye in the series. Here, Vainre let a single drop of purple paint fall onto
the center of the canvas, which splattered in every direction, and then proceeded to rework it — first through photography and then through Stable Diffusion’s image-to-image generator.
In other words, the center of the image is a pure human gesture and physical fact; then, the
further one moves toward the outer edges, “the machine takes over.” Here, the artist is
interested in how the machine imitates and interprets human input.

) represents the smiling mouth in the series, where Vainre continued a so-called synthetic
visual created with the aid of an image generator by hand, and vice versa — making arbitrary, rough physical gestures with paint, which were then further developed with the image generator and subsequently applied to the canvas by hand. It is like a conversation, a collaboration, where one takes over the thread or the unfinished work from the other, and from the resulting entanglement it becomes impossible to tell where the human ends and the artificial begins.

Mart Vainre: Painting Beyond the Self

As a former photorealist, I have been interested in the moment when my own handwriting
(and, by extension, character) dissolves into a more universal visual language — where I can,
as it were, free myself from my human limitations and rely on more documentary, seemingly more objective facts. As a painter, where the illusory visual and the author’s unique handwriting are often central, I have thus sought a path beyond myself, so to speak.

It is possible that this series could be called AI-realism, where the human undertakes to imitate what the image generator has produced. While visually this is very exciting — the AI-generated visual is so strangely uncanny — as a human, I sense a resistance when imitating what the
machine has generated. In this era of AI’s so-called triumph, I feel that my own subjectivity and
human error are no longer the limitation — rather, I sense that this inner voice in me, this intuition, is growing ever quieter. In delegating a lot to machines in the name of speed and efficiency,
I often feel more like an AI operator who forgets his own agenda in the process, surfing exciting generative waves until I am lost.

This series is driven by a desire to face the situation head-on — one in which the human and the artificial are intertwined. What is depicted here is a gradation from one to the other. You could say that as a painter, I have ‘painted myself into a corner’ here, only to leap from there into a new reality. If the works , and . are, for me, a power struggle marked by suspicion of the other side, then ) is already a liberated trip borne of techno-psychedelia.