The work of David M. Ball begins with a desire to escape what has become familiar. After decades of working with collage, acrylic, and colored pencil, he found that the visual language he had carefully developed had also begun to constrain him. Its fluency became a form of repetition. He needed to find a path where the outcome was once again uncertain.

Ball began using generative image software as a conceptual tool, asking it to bring together artists, movements, bodies, and visual traditions that would rarely occupy the same space. Otto Dix might encounter El Greco; Dada might fracture the composed surfaces of early fashion photography. These collisions rarely produce a finished image. That failure became essential. The process resembled chance, excavation, and argument: countless images generated, rejected, altered, dismantled, and recombined before a viable form began to surface.

Ball gathers these fragments, alters their proportions, replaces faces and limbs, and combines elements from multiple generated images until a composition arrives at its own internal necessity. The resulting digital collage is then printed, enlarged, and translated by hand into oil on wood panel. Through paint, the image leaves the frictionless space of the screen and enters the resistant world of surface, pigment, scale, and touch.

Here, technology functions as a destabilizing instrument, a way of moving beyond certainty. The final paintings remain entirely handmade, shaped by judgment, revision, and the resistance of surface. They arise from a productive tension between the generated, the chosen, the inherited, the invented; a collision of control and accident.

Ball’s practice is sustained by the belief that an artist must remain vulnerable to transformation. The work moves forward by refusing the comforts of repetition, arriving instead at images that feel unfamiliar even to their maker. Surprise becomes more than an aesthetic effect: it becomes a form of necessity, a way of keeping perception alive.

Ilya Shkipin paints people and places that seem familiar yet remain just beyond reach. His work often begins with photographs, digital collages, or, in recent years, AI-generated references. Yet technology is neither the subject nor the destination. By the time an image reaches the canvas, its original source has begun to dissolve.

What matters to Shkipin is what survives translation: a gesture, an atmosphere, the uneasy recognition of something half-remembered. Through paint, he slows the image down, interrupting its apparent certainty until it becomes unstable again. Faces soften, spaces shift, and the familiar begins to loosen from itself.

The resulting paintings occupy an unsettled territory between image and memory. They feel known without becoming fully legible and intimate without offering possession. In this suspension, perception becomes active. The viewer is asked to remain with what cannot be immediately named.

Shkipin’s paintings suggest that memory is less an archive than a living material—fragile, mutable, and continually remade. Paint gives these unstable images weight and duration while preserving their distance. They remain present, yet slightly beyond explanation.

Together, the paintings of Ball and Shkipin occupy a fragile interval between recognition and estrangement. Ball builds outward, gathering figures, histories, costumes, and visual languages into crowded worlds where identity appears assembled, ceremonial, and continually revised. Shkipin moves inward, dissolving bodies and rooms through smears, veils, and ruptures of paint until intimacy itself becomes uncertain. One multiplies the image; the other erodes it. Yet both arrive at the same threshold, where a face can no longer be taken for granted and the human figure becomes a site of longing and transformation.

These works ask what remains after an image has passed through machines memory, history, and the artist’s hand. The answer is neither certainty nor resolution. It is presence—fractured, strange, and still capable of recognition.