There are moments when the eye lingers on a stain, a crack, a fleeting shadow, and something stirs. Two dots, a curve, a suggestion. Suddenly, a presence emerges. The human brain has done what it has always done: summoned a face from chaos. It’s an ancient reflex, older than language itself, born in caves and forests, sharpened through survival. To see a face where there is none was once a matter of life and death; today, it remains a quiet hallucination, a daily act of perceptual construction.

0010’s new body of work starts from this primal mechanism. Each piece begins with a familiar profile, the artist’s signature side-facing visage, and gradually unravels. Stroke after stroke, line after line, the face is fractured, stretched, dissolved into shadow and symbol. “It was surprisingly intuitive,” 0010 recalls. “I dissected the face shape into abstract compositions and it still resembled a face, somewhat.” What begins as recognition ends as evanescence; the face hovers on the threshold between presence and disappearance, like a memory half-remembered.

This threshold, the absolute limit of recognizability, is where 0010’s research takes root. Works such as Roaring Tides, Scales, and Birth reduce the human visage to its barest remains: distorted eyes, suspended like fragments of an ancient code. It’s here that personal memory gives way to archetype. These are not portraits of individuals, but of perception itself; not recollections, but relics of a collective hallucination.

Line and shadow are the primary agents of this metamorphosis. Though created digitally, the surfaces of 0010’s works echo the tactility of traditional mediums, wood, ink, early paper, blurring the boundaries between the digital present and an imagined antiquity. “I’ve always liked the idea of a digital work resembling a traditional medium, almost to a point where you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart,” the artist notes. This intentional ambiguity of material anchors the works in a timeless visual field, where the ancient and the contemporary speak the same visual tongue.

Beneath the formal rigor lies a deeper conceptual terrain: hallucination as the foundation of human systems. “Art itself is a sort of hallucination,” 0010 reflects. “As is every other ‘social construct’ since the invention of language and money. Humanity was built on myths, and they are central to our species every day.” Symbols such as eyes, stars, and spheres, deliberately simple, recur like echoes of our earliest attempts to name the world. These are the proto-alphabets of meaning, the shared codes that structured civilizations long before history was written.

Historical resonance permeates the series. 0010 draws inspiration from early civilizations, from the Bronze Age to Rome, channeling not their conquests but their inscriptions, the way they carved myths into stone and sky. The works seem to arrive from a time outside time: they are neither past nor future, but suspended in a mythic present, like tablets uncovered in a place that never truly existed yet feels unmistakably familiar.

There is, ultimately, an invitation embedded in these images: to look differently. To stand before a mark and allow the brain to do what it does best, construct, project, hallucinate. In that act, the viewer becomes part of the work’s generative mechanism, co-creating meaning at the edge of perception. 0010 hopes this process will awaken curiosity: “I hope people think about these myths and hallucinations we’ve collectively agreed upon for millennia. Reality is crazier than fiction, I can assure you.”

In the dissolution of faces, a new clarity emerges, not of form, but of awareness. 0010 does not simply depict faces; he disassembles the very act of seeing them.