Collection: JULIEN BONET - Masquerades

With Masquerades, French artist Julien Bonet creates a series of AI-generated portraits that oscillate between ethnographic documentation and contemporary fiction. Their starting point is Europe's winter masquerades – archaic festivals in which wild costumes and ritual choreographies represent the struggle between winter and spring, order and chaos. Bonet, who grew up in the 1980s and was shaped by cultural ruptures between the analog and digital worlds, transforms these traditions into a visual language that reflects current societal anxieties: the climate crisis, migration, pandemics, questions of identity.

After initial experience in advertising and fashion photography, Bonet found a new artistic freedom through working with generative AI. Inspired by John Heartfield's photomontages, he uses the technology like a camera—not to imitate existing styles, but to visualize the unimaginable. His frontally staged figures appear both familiar and strange: mythical archetypes that stare directly at us yet originate from a nonexistent reality.

The series is a commentary on the power of myths in the digital age. Just as ancient tales drew on collective memory, AI also draws on immense image archives and forms new narratives from them. Bonet deliberately seeks out those moments in which the machine "loses its stride"—when algorithmic logic tips into poetic strangeness and produces unexpected images.

Each motif is created in a complex process spanning several thousand image generations. The results are hybrid visual worlds that appear documentary while simultaneously celebrating the imaginary. Bonet's Masquerades invite us to reexamine timeless questions: Who are we in the mirror of our fears? What masks do we wear today? And how does technology transform our myths of tomorrow?