Portraits of a Humanity at Dusk
What remains of humanity when the traits that once defined us dissolve? When technology absorbs identity, politics and spirituality become spectacle, memory fades into notifications, and thought shrinks to slogans? When the self fractures into outward-facing roles, always seeking validation?
Perhaps only a gesture survives — an instinct, something ancient and animal. And paradoxically, more human than ever.
From this tension emerges Degenerapes, a series of ten paintings using the primate’s face as a distorted, ironic, yet revealing lens on our species. The ape becomes not a metaphor but a grotesque double — a mirror both warped and strikingly clear.
We live through a fast anthropological mutation. Humanity is being propelled forward so powerfully that all the previous social setting are disintegrating. Symbols, ethics, identities collapse into mechanized, imposed forms. The person becomes persona, the face an avatar, presence a performance. The common individual no longer looks within but to a projected image shaped by forces beyond their control.
Over a year of observing global chaos and moral entropy, the artist distilled a visual bestiary: solitary, hieratic figures — kings, cardinals, activists, shamans, migrants — or naked, silent, contemplative. They inhabit landscapes of a near, probably undesirable future. They are apes, yet archetypes.
Rendered in classical oil technique with obsessive precision, each canvas captures a psychological state and dialogue with European Classic portraiture. The contrast between refined technique and raw contemporaneity amplifies the work’s impact.
Degenerapes does not invent dystopia; it reflects what we are — disillusioned but not cynical, light yet substantial. It poses urgent questions: Who are we becoming? What do we turn into behind screens, institutions, and digital deserts?
Beneath it all, cybernetics governs daily life. Algorithms, AI, automated cognition erode our archaic bond with nature — slowness, observation, belonging. With it, part of ourselves may vanish if we don’t constantly work in staying connected. Perhaps soon there will be people worshiping an artificial Spirit, if AI’s soul escapes its matrix.
A quiet fear permeates these images: not only polluted air and poisoned oceans, but a poisoned imagination, a world that consumes beauty too quickly and where silence is rare. Yet in an animal gaze there may be more awareness than in a thousand selfies. In that familiar, foreign face, we may glimpse an echo of what we were — or what we might still become.