Print art project, 2026

Portraces is a print art project that produces portraits in cyanotype of Andy Solon and Daru. The images are not derived from photographs of a model. They are generated by artificial intelligence from the universes that define each of these personas.

Andy Solon and Daru are not documentary identities. They do not correspond to someone who can be verified outside these images. They are artist personas created by an author, and it is this construction that determines how these bodies appear, how they present themselves, and how they repeat. At the same time, they do not exist only as images. They produce music, circulate, are heard, and speak to real listeners. The compositions are developed with intention and authorship by a real artist behind these personas. Still, in a context where image and voice can be generated, manipulated, and classified as suspect, they no longer sustain, on their own, a relationship of trust.

In the digital environment, these images have no fixed form. They can be remade, adjusted, and multiplied continuously. They do not exist as objects. They exist in continuous variation.

Cyanotype shifts the image into another register. It is a 19th-century process based on light acting on a photosensitive surface. The image depends on time, exposure, and material. It is no longer only variable; it is fixed onto a surface. It becomes an object that can be held.

This shift touches directly on how portraiture has been understood historically. In the 19th century, particularly with the emergence of photography, the portrait came to function as a means of identification, memory, record, and status. An image carried the idea that someone had been there, and that this person mattered. This link between image, existence, and value sustained the credibility of the portrait for a long time.

Today, this relationship no longer holds in the same way. A face can be generated without a body. An image can exist without a referent. The portrait no longer functions as proof, and trust in the image becomes contested.

Portraces operates within this condition. By producing portraits of artist personas, the project approaches the idea of the portrait as document, without being able to assume that function. The image does not confirm an identity.

Cyanotype does not resolve this instability. What it does instead is something else. It uses a technique historically associated with inscription and record to fix an image whose origin remains unstable. The image exists physically; it occupies space, has a surface, and can be touched. But this existence does not turn it into proof of who is depicted.

The portrait shifts. It no longer guarantees identity; it records a process. What is seen is not evidence of someone, but the result of a construction: a defined universe, a generated image, and a fixed form.

Portraces is built on this passage—between an image that can always change and one that comes to exist. In that interval, trust no longer rests on the origin of the image, but on the conditions under which it is produced, recognized, and legitimized.

Collaboration

The work emerges from the dialogue between two distinct lines of inquiry: on one side, the construction of universes and personas by André Martinez; on the other, Leonardo Maia’s research into the relationship between images generated through artificial intelligence and their inscription through cyanotype.