Thalis

Robert Mapplethorpe said, “I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.” I share his obsession — and his frustration. Thalis is an act of restraint: a meditation on simplicity, silence, and the pursuit of perfection. Where Anthos embraced baroque abundance, Thalis pares everything back. One subject. One gesture. The tulip: a symbol of love, affection, renewal, and transience. The flowers in Mapplethorpe’s photographs — stark, sensual, poised — were real, of course. His blooms existed. Mine do not. Or perhaps they do, in some other dimension, just beyond reach.

Photography was once dismissed — mechanical, unemotional, not truly art. But time reshapes perception. The lens became a tool of vision, of authorship, of truth. Today, we stand at the birth of another medium: synthography — images made not with pigment or light, but with code and linguistic control. Thalis is not generative chaos. It is measured, rational — a conversation between mind and machine. I’ve drawn from photographic tradition itself — the discipline of the gelatin silver print, where light becomes substance and shadow becomes structure. Mapplethorpe had his camera and darkroom. I have prompts, processors, and probability engines. Yet the desire remains the same: to hold time still, to make beauty from silence. 

If Mapplethorpe had access to generative AI, he wouldn’t be cautious. He wouldn’t be sentimental. He’d push it to the edge. He’d make it bleed silver. He’d ask: Can a flower wound you? Can a shadow seduce? I’ve asked those same questions. Flux cannot always answer them faithfully — its shadows twist into abstractions, its light bends strangely. Yet even those failures reveal something true: that beauty today is negotiated, not guaranteed. And now I want these images to become physical — archival, exacting, and real. Ultra-HD photo prints on aluminium dibond. Ilford baryta paper for the black-and-white works. Some large, some small. Always precise. Always personal.