JULIEN BONET - Burnout

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2023

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.