Ángela Leyva

M.Q.S.N.F3: INCARNATION

M.Q.S.N. – F3: Incarnation is an installation that emerges from the project Máquinas que sueñan niños (M.Q.S.N.), conceived in three phases, each corresponding to a distinct state of image and matter. In this third and final stage, the image abandons regimes of latency, suspension, and containment to assume a pictorial form that is finite and situated.

The paintings that make up this installation originate from images generated through the intersection of hybridized archives using generative adversarial networks (GANs), a class of artificial intelligence algorithms. These images were used as sketches—not as models to be reproduced, but as points of departure for a process of pictorial translation.

The compositions propose a series of figures that do not fully belong to human life nor to digital fiction. Instead, they manifest through painting as spectral entities oscillating between the clinical and the imaginary: presences without stable identity or possible biography, which do not seek to fix faces or restore bodies, but to activate a state of incarnation.

The installation reinforces this condition. Suspended from a cubic structure that does not operate as a matrix, but as a volume of containment, the paintings are arranged within a space that, when unfolded, exposes its interior. The cube, once unfolded, ceases to function as an enclosure and becomes a site of appearance. Within it, error, distortion, and mutation are assumed not as failure, but as possibilities for meaning and resurgence.

Here, painting abandons the reversible flow of data and responds to the algorithmic image by transforming it. Confronted with the coldness of the technical image, the materiality of oil paint introduces thickness, gesture, vibration, and time. To incarnate does not mean to humanize, but to accept the limit as a condition of appearance and symbolic persistence.

In memory of S.D.

— Ángela Leyva