Matt Brackett

What makes us all human? What binds us together and breaks us apart? And how do we distinguish between reality and falsehood in our perceptions of the world? These are all questions I pose in this series of imaginary portraits, intended as a reflection on our current era of social and political upheaval. The paintings are based on an independent web-based algorithm that generates photorealistic faces of people that look lifelike, but in fact don't exist. While representing a broad range of ages, genders, races and ethnicities, these paintings portray unclothed individuals in a family of dark blue grays as if to suggest an underlying vulnerability and unity. While these images - like all painting - embody a fiction, I wanted to seek a form of truth from faces of imagined fellow citizens in light of the expanding fissures of racial tension, disinformation and pandemic. If traditional portraiture reveals the soul of the sitter, I found that perhaps these portraits instead reveal the soul of the viewer. Before these paintings, I have a chance to reflect on what else I perceive as real or true. Have we been made to see each other as unknowable, even alien? I come back to the eyes as key here; they are particularly bright in channeling a certainty that we are all intertwined and that we can imagine healing ahead.