There is something paradoxical about Doe’s world: it feels new and yet profoundly ancient, futuristic and ritualistic at once. His latest series, Synapse, stages this paradox deliberately, offering a body of work that transforms the language of tarot into a living deck of digital archetypes. What once belonged to paper, pigment, and the intimate gesture of shuffling a deck is here reborn as a sequence of portraits sculpted in code, polished in light, and charged with the hum of invisible circuits.

Each piece operates like a card drawn from an otherworldly deck, the sovereign, the jester, the warrior, the prophet, yet none of them fully belong to the symbolic lineages they evoke. They appear as specters of our own networked condition, formed as much by meme culture, crypto-economics, and algorithmic influence as by the compositional rigor of Renaissance portraiture. Crowns become echoes of viral fame; masks interrogate the fracture between our public personas and our hidden selves; jewelry gleams like digital assets, emblems of value in an economy of attention. Even the interfaces that frame them, grids, diagnostic glyphs, vectorial overlays, are not mere decoration but narrative scaffolding, situating each figure within the datascapes that define our era.

There is a deep irony in this. Tarot emerged as a tool of divination, a means to read the future through the tactile shuffle of the past. Doe reframes this gesture for an age where prophecy is no longer mystical but computational, where prediction comes not from oracles but from algorithms that learn our desires faster than we can name them. In this sense, Synapse is not simply a contemporary tarot: it is an act of resistance against clarity, an insistence that mystery still matters, that myth can survive the cold eye of the machine.

What makes the series so compelling is its embrace of contradiction. Nostalgia and futurism do not cancel each other out here; they spark against each other, creating a productive friction that becomes the engine of Doe’s aesthetic. He sculpts his figures in 3D with a precision that suggests permanence, as if each were carved from data itself, yet he allows their edges to fracture with scan lines, color fringing, and gentle glitches. They flicker as if they are still loading, still becoming, never fully fixed. This is not a flaw but a principle: revelation must pass through interference, and truth,if it appears at all, is always partial, always unstable.

The result is a double image: you see a portrait, and you also see the system thinking about the portrait. This doubling reshapes each archetype into something uncannily present. The sovereign is not just a ruler but an algorithmic curator of attention, an authority masked by spectacle. The jester is not only a trickster but a viral saboteur, bending the logic of memes to expose the absurdity of power. The prophet is not a seer but a ghost in the archive, burdened with perfect memory and unable to forget. Even the warrior, often imagined as pure force, becomes an avatar of endurance within networks that never sleep, a figure of willpower trapped in perpetual motion.

Formally, Doe achieves this through a process that mirrors the tension embedded in his themes. He begins by generating base models through AI, then meticulously reshapes them in Blender, employing toon shaders and outlined geometry to give the renders an illustrated quality despite their three-dimensional origin. Every surface is negotiated: polished areas suggest desire and aspiration, while worn textures whisper of entropy and time. Once the 3D stage is complete, he moves into Photoshop, adding layers of abstraction, noise, and tactile texture, as though he were reintroducing the human hand after the perfection of the machine. It is a choreography of precision and rupture, of control and disruption, a visual language that embodies the same contradictions it seeks to explore.

Yet Synapse is not only about what is shown, but what is withheld. Many figures seem suspended between revelation and concealment, revealing only fragments, like transmissions caught mid-signal. This is not simply an aesthetic choice but a narrative one. Concealment here becomes the story itself: it speaks to the opacity of the systems that shape our lives, the privacy we surrender unknowingly, the data shadows that trail us unseen. The figures reflect our condition of partial knowing, of existing inside feeds that claim to reveal the world yet conceal its mechanisms. They remind us that what is hidden is not an absence, but a presence we cannot quite name.

The experience of viewing Synapse becomes an act of divination in itself. The works are arranged like a spread of cards: they can be read individually for quiet insight or in pairs and clusters for contradiction, echo, and tension. There is no fixed sequence, no prescribed narrative. Doe deliberately resists imposing meaning. Instead, he invites projection, encouraging collectors to choose the cards that resonate with their personal myths and to weave their own interpretations around them. In this way, each acquisition becomes a ritual of self recognition, a mirror drawn from the future, reflecting back some hidden part of the present.

Underlying it all is a reverence for the history of portraiture. While the surfaces shimmer with digital glow, the logic of composition remains rooted in the old masters: the measured silhouettes, the deliberate negative space, the symbolic props that once revealed status or virtue. Doe channels this tradition not to imitate it but to rewire it, to ask what portraiture means when our faces are filtered, our identities curated, and our legacies stored in data archives rather than marble or oil. If Renaissance portraiture celebrated the emergence of the individual, Synapse interrogates its dispersal, showing us selves dissolved into signals, remembered not by their essence but by their metadata.

Ultimately, Synapse is less a collection of images than a symbolic operating system, a mythology upgraded for the screen. It suggests that humanity will always rewrite its archetypes to navigate uncertainty, and that myth, far from being erased by technology, mutates through it. Meaning, Doe reminds us, is not handed down. It appears in the act of looking, in the moment when the human gaze lingers long enough on a luminous surface and begins to imagine what it might be seeing.

In this sense, Synapse does not conclude, it propagates. Like a true deck, it is designed for expansion, for recombination, for ongoing dialogue with the future. Each new figure Doe creates will not close the series but extend its constellation, mapping the shifting coordinates of power, fear, hope, and consequence in a world made of signals. These are not portraits of what we are, but of what we are becoming, luminous and unstable, half-seen, half-invented, waiting to be read.