Jason Puccinelli - “Mimic”

new paintings

June 3rd - July 1st

Opening night reception June 3rd 6-9pm ~ Artist In Attendance

Roq La Rue is please to present a solo show of paintings by NW based artist Jason Puccinelli.
Intrigued by the potentialities, fears, and controversy over AI generated artwork, Puccinelli decided to “collaborate” with AI, and created a series of anachronistic images with clunky robots and uncanny android like humans celebrating together over confusing feasts in dining rooms straight out of an 19th century brasserie. Once images were generated through AI by the artists prompts, Puccinelli then edited and curated the digital images, and then completely replicated them by hand in oil paints on panel. Mimicking the mimicker, as it were.
The result is a retro-futuristic surrealist carnival worthy of the the most fevered cyberpunk fantasies. Join our dystopian salon June 3rd - July 1st.

“Digesting what we see and regurgitating it in some new form has been the foundation of the creative process since the beginning of humankind. We mimic each other. Sometimes the reproduction process is poor, but other times the copy is better than the original. As with natural selection, new iterations become the dominant form that is then, further embellished and plagiarized.

Artificial intelligence creates a foundation using millions of images upon which new art is generated. If the art that AI image generators reference is not given credit, does that make it plagiarism? Historically, artists have never been required to give credit to every influential work that they have seen. If they were able to operate without referencing their influences, should we let AI do the same?

In my exploration of AI as a creative tool, I realized that it challenges our understanding of what it means to create art. With AI on the brink of sentience, we are faced with the question of how to relate to this new technology: should we reject it, or should we embrace it? This show celebrates the latter, welcoming AI as a guest of honor to the artistic table.

In creating these paintings I employed AI to design and generate images of artificial intelligence (robots) celebrating with humans in front of a feast. After editing and curating the images, I drew and painted them by hand. How much credit do I take in this process? I most certainly did not create them alone. Hundreds if not thousands of other people that I have never met contributed to this work.

Painting these images taught me a lot. I had to adapt the way I see, and had to steer away from using my familiar tricks as an artist in order to capture the essence of each image without putting my own spin on it. I had to trust what my collaborators handed me, even when I questioned a weird composition: a twisted figure, an odd color combination. When I tried to fix things that seemed like a problem, some of the magic was missing. So I went about the work with the mindset of a art conservationist , trying to recreate and preserve a lost piece of art."

- Jason Puccinelli 2023

Show images and info below. Please feel free to contact us for additional higher res images, detail shots, or videos of a piece that’s of interest.