Qualia II
2017–Present | Digital & Semi-Digital Works
Qualia II continues the perceptual enquiry of its predecessor, but through a radically transformed process. The series builds upon a body of GAN-generated images trained on Chronis’s own physical paintings, which are then digitally overpainted, disrupted, and reconstituted. Each work in the series is a recursive dialogue between author and machine: an unstable loop of mimicry, resistance, and reinterpretation.
What results is not digital simulation but digital re-inscription. Flesh becomes algorithm. Paint becomes glitch. Gesture becomes artifact. Across this terrain, Chronis explores what remains of authorship and sensation once the original hand is mediated, reflected, and returned as image.
Qualia II is not a continuation, it is a feedback.
"Etude: still life with dancing figures"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2023
"Glitch-Lilies floating on pixel soup"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2022
"Teleology of the Bull"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2022
"Cave Dwellers"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2022
"Paradigm shift"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2022
"Tragacanth (Journey of Human Struggle)"
digital painting, digital collage, glitch and AI generation over physical work
2022
Tragacanth refers to a small tree whose sap, Gum Tragacanth, has been used for centuries as a binder in soft pastels. This work takes the material origin of that binder as both metaphor and mechanism. The tree becomes a conduit: a point where image, matter, and body fuse and unravel.
What unfolds is not a landscape, but a system in collapse and regeneration. Root forms, limbs, and torsos merge and rot, suspended between figuration and sediment. Colour fields, synthetic blue, acid yellow, flesh-pink, break the logic of depth, acting more like psychic intrusions than atmospheric light.
Executed in a digital language that borrows from traditional media but resists nostalgia, the piece explores painting as a porous ecology. The tragacanth tree bleeds form into being, only to let it decay again. There is no fixed anatomy, only thresholds. Body becomes bark, pigment becomes wound.
In this work, the surface does not represent. It seeps.