Strata

This project takes its cue from the language of collage and montage, the cut-and-paste logic that defined the late twentieth century’s visual culture. When Adobe Photoshop was released in 1988, it offered artists and designers a new grammar of layering — cut-outs, halftones, drop shadows, text fragments — all assembled on a digital plane. These works borrow that grammar but reroute it through Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra, where images are not edited but written into existence. The results were not created in Photoshop, but they feel like they could have been. They are montage reimagined as synthetic hallucination, crafted with generative artificial intelligence.

At the centre of these compositions are familiar domestic motifs: design-classic chairs clipped into decal form; potted plants and cacti flattened into stickers; vases rendered with glossy, reflective glazes; grayscale flower silhouettes cut like paper scraps. These collide with graphic interventions that suggest Photoshop’s touch — abstract overlays, pasted shapes, digital halftones, layered textures. Across the surfaces, waves of vandalism intrude — spray paint graffiti tags, neon scrawls, and drips that defy gravity. Shadows contradict, objects float forward, layers misalign. Space becomes unstable, depth flickers between the believable and the impossible. These are not orderly still lifes, but images that look as though they have been built, vandalised, and rebuilt again.

The works behave like magazine spreads or posters, yet they resist legibility. Flux occasionally inserts illegible fragments of text — nonsense words, broken letters — and rather than mistakes, these are treated as features of the medium. Just as the model hallucinates artist’s marks such as edition numbers or signatures in print-like works, here it fabricates typographic debris. The result is an uneasy fiction: objects that seem real but are not; marks that look intentional but belong to the machine. Each composition is a synthetic illusion, a space where plants, furniture, ceramics, flowers, and hostile graffiti coexist on one unstable plane. They remind us that every image — whether painting, photograph, or synthograph — is artificial, built on layers, and always vulnerable to sabotage.