In an era where digital images are produced at the speed of thought and consumed even faster, BrutalEth chooses a different tempo. His latest collection unfolds not as an eruption of technological virtuosity, but as a disciplined excavation. What appears on screen is not the triumph of the machine, but the residue of a long process of hesitation, memory, and deliberate restraint.

Behind the alias BrutalEth stands Marco Bonafè, an artist whose trajectory resists clean breaks. From classical training to graffiti, from tattooing to sculpture, from material installations to blockchain-based works, his practice has never followed the logic of replacement. Instead, it accumulates. Each new medium becomes another layer rather than a reset, another drawer added to a cabinet that remains, as he puts it, permanently open.

This collection makes that cabinet visible.

The tension between fullness and emptiness, so central to BrutalEth’s visual language, is not a purely formal concern. Emptiness here behaves like a temporal condition. It is a suspension, a pause that refuses immediate legibility. These voids are not neutral spaces waiting to be filled; they are zones of latency, where something has already happened or is about to happen. Color, structure, and geometry emerge from these intervals almost reluctantly, as if pulled from a deeper sediment of time.

What distinguishes BrutalEth’s engagement with artificial intelligence is not the novelty of the tool, but the way it is deliberately constrained. AI is not treated as an autonomous generator, nor as a spectacle of infinite possibility. It functions instead as a field of variation, a space where the artist rehearses memory rather than invents ex nihilo. Hundreds of iterations are produced not to chase the best image, but to exhaust the image of its immediacy. Selection becomes a form of writing. Repetition, a method of erosion.

The process always begins elsewhere, with the hand. Sketches, rough forms, incomplete gestures act as the first inscription. When these traces re-enter the digital domain, they carry with them imperfections, smudges, and hesitations that resist algorithmic smoothness. Even when the machine intervenes, it does so within a vocabulary already shaped by the artist’s own visual archive. The result is not a collaboration between human and AI in considered proportions, but a hierarchy: technology serves the act of remembering.

In the final phase, Photoshop becomes less a software than a studio. Low-resolution AI outputs are dismantled, repainted, layered, and reconstructed at scale. Pixels are treated as matter. Layers accumulate like geological strata. Images collide, overlap, and partially erase one another, destabilizing any fixed reading. Space becomes ambiguous, architecture implausible, perspective untrustworthy. The viewer is invited to linger in uncertainty rather than resolve it.

Human presence, when it appears, does so as a shadow. A silhouette. A sign without identity. These figures do not dominate the image; they endure it. Trapped within impossible structures or absorbed into synthetic landscapes, they function less as protagonists than as witnesses. In Uninhabited Landscape, the human merges seamlessly with machine and environment, not as a dramatic collapse but as a quiet, almost natural consequence of evolution.

Yet this is not a dystopian vision. BrutalEth’s work carries no fascination with catastrophe. Instead, it reflects the perspective of someone who has lived both before and after the digital saturation of everyday life. There is immersion, but also distance. An awareness that technology, however pervasive, remains a tool we have authored. The danger lies not in its presence, but in forgetting the slowness required to use it consciously.

Perhaps this is the most radical aspect of the collection. In a visual economy driven by speed, automation, and excess, BrutalEth constructs images that insist on duration. They ask to be read rather than scrolled. They operate collectively rather than individually, forming a narrative that only emerges through comparison and accumulation. No work stands alone; meaning is generated in the gaps between them.

What remains, at the end of this process, is neither purely digital nor nostalgically material. It is a controlled visual ecology, where memory, gesture, and machine coexist without collapsing into spectacle. BrutalEth does not attempt to humanize the algorithm. He slows it down. And in doing so, he reclaims the image as a space of thought rather than output.

In a time obsessed with production, this collection proposes something rarer: attention.