005: Tim Irani
Into the MultAIverse
Welcome to Issue 005 of Several Artists!
Back from the dead distracted!
Tim Irani: Outside in, 2024
On a recent trip to Santa Monica I found the work of Tim Irani at Richard Heller, one of the better galleries at Bergamont Station.
At first glance his work seemed uncanny, but little did I know it was sourced from the Uncanny Valley itself. My initial take was that it looked like contemporary South-East Asian work but with a little too much Blue Rider from art-history class. In a quite charming way! Almost — too charming to be real?
Turns out, it is both real and not. Irani did some minimal training (presumably fine-tuning) of an AI model with his own work, then generated a bunch of images, then reworked those as his (presumably human) brain saw fit, and finally selected elements to use in the oil paintings. If I understood the setup correctly, the final composition was in fact from the human and not the robot.
You can see for yourself that the images are pretty interesting, and have a very specific look, though at this juncture I would not immediately recognize that look as “AI.” Certainly it’s far from the Hallucinatory Wing of AI Art, and not exactly close to the Plagiarist / Ghibli Wing either. But you know, it gets harder each day to tell the “real” from the “gen.”
I should add that in opposition to the urge, now nearly universal, to make the size of artworks inversely proportional to the effort used to construct the originals, these are modest in size and would look damn good on your wall, Dear Collector. I’m not blabbing about prices but I found them reasonable.
The particular challenge of these pictures is that they are both original physical paintings, and unambiguously also the product of generative AI — and not in the normal sense of prompt-for-slop. The AI is bound in early in the creative process, enough that if these machines were intelligent (are they? are we?) then it would only do to call it a collaboration.
And that’s something worth chewing on for a bit. The discourse around generative AI usually splits between the Doomers, who see it as an existential threat to the humanity of cultural endeavor; and the other side, let’s call them the Knollites, who see it as more or less analogous to Photoshop and expect it to usher in a Cambrian explosion of human creativity in which the beautiful will at least hold its own against the slop.
But Tim Irani is jacking into the matrix before it even gets to the slop farm. What if your AI is your partner in crime? What if it’s the Vincent to your Paul, or even the Theo to your Vincent? What if it’s as an assistant is to Koons, or as a wife? What if instead of prompts, you deal in Life Lessons? What if all this is the other way around?
About these things, you are invited to think as you contemplate these actually quite lovely paintings. And also: has everyone here busted out the ouija board to ask Franz Marc what he thinks?
Tim Irani: Fawn, 2025
Copyrights
Text (c) Copyright 2025 Kevin Frost, all rights reserved.
Photographs as photographs (c) Copyright 2025 Kevin Frost, all rights reserved.
Artwork itself (c) Copyright the respective artists, all rights reserved.
Disclaimer
I make art, and I also collect art. If I own art by any of the artists featured in the Several Artists newsletter at the time of writing, I will call that out. This may not be done retroactively; and you should keep in mind that I want to own art by every single artist I write about, and you should want to own their art too.