Rubenesque

Rubenesque is a work in the form of a lenticular print that reinterprets the female bodies depicted in Peter Paul Rubens' painting The Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1618). The artist has removed the male kidnappers from the scene, replacing their bodies with her own image generated with deepfake technology and replicated using pornographic generative diffusion models. Unable to recognise the poses of the figures' shoulders, the model translated them into the only visual language of pornography it knows, recreating the violence depicted in Rubens's painting in a different, new form. As a result, the artist's multiplied likeness has been dispersed and merged unpredictably with the borrowed bodies of the other women. Following the removal of the male figures, the scene was appropriated by the model, and subsequently by the viewer, whose movement relative to the print causes the figures to constantly dissolve, making it impossible to capture them in their entirety from any single vantage point.