Hybrids
2025
Oil on Canvas
The plotter draws a body that has never moved. The brush paints one that cannot stay still.
Gestures is a series of paintings and studies of the human figure: full figures, limbs, hands. The process follows the same logic as Hybrids: computer vision reads the structural geometry of a figure and translates it into vector paths that a plotter draws onto primed canvas. But where Hybrids asks who holds the instrument, Gestures asks what the body does with the space the instrument has made. Working in oil over the plotted lines, I paint not from the source image but from the figure itself: its weight, its inclination, the quality of held tension in a hand or the loose fall of a shoulder. The machine establishes what can be measured. I return what measurement leaves out.
The title names both the subject and the method. To paint a gesture is already to perform one; the mark made by the brush carries the movement of the arm that held it. Some of these works are hands alone: the hand as the most legible human form, the thing that has held tools and drawn marks and reached toward others longer than we have had words for any of it. A hand is also what paints the canvas. To paint a hand is to fold the instrument back into its subject.
These paintings continue an exploration of drawing machines begun with Skylines (2014), developed through Hybrids and Memories, and running through the plotter-painted portraits of Santos (2026).
