Arca
If Robert Rauschenberg built his Combines from the wreckage of modernity, these works are assembled from the wreckage of reality itself. ARCA is an act of synthesis, conjuring materiality through the immaterial. These cabinets exist, yet they do not. Their surfaces tell a story of decay—peeling paint, rusted hinges, tarnished metal, splintered driftwood—yet they have no weight, no scent, no tactility beyond the glass of a screen. They are artefacts from a parallel history, crafted not by hand but through synthography—a process that does not replicate the real but invents it anew. Wood does not rot, metal does not corrode, hinges do not stiffen. They only appear to. Yet their cracked paint, corroded latches, and traces of graffiti suggest history—a past function that never truly existed. Ce n’est pas la réalité.
Assemblage is a process of discovery—form emerging through construction. ARCA evolved as all assemblages do: one decision leading to another, objects accumulating into something grander. Single cabinets multiply, stacking into formations that seem both structured and chaotic. Some doors remain closed, sealed against time, while others open to reveal curated relics—forgotten museum artefacts, assembled into a dusty hoarder’s shrine. Then, as if resisting their own rigid geometries, these structures reconfigure, collapsing into sculptural impossibilities—a square turns into a circle, storage becomes spectacle. Some forms defy gravity, becoming floating constructions where the boundary between object and architecture potentially dissolves.
ARCA fabricates reality and forces the viewer to believe in its past. These objects were not built with wood and metal. They were crafted with language—words precisely arranged to summon form from nothingness. And so we return to the central question: what is material, and what is illusion? AI does not carve wood, weld metal, or apply layers of peeling paint over decades—yet here, in these images, it has done all of those things. The eye believes because it wants to. ARCA is a paradox of craftsmanship—an architecture of decay, a relic from a history that never happened. In the physical world, these works do not exist. And yet, here they are.
