Simon Lavi

gm! "Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color! #004" by @SimonRaion

Changing Places by @SimonRaion When I first saw photorealistic images being created with AI, I was interested in the results, but my reaction always was "Is this it?" I didn't think it was doing enough ↓ A text written by curator @gallegosfer ☕️

"Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color! #037" by @SimonRaion → Collected by @lifeofc

Revisited → Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color! by @SimonRaion Back in April 2023, just as the novelty around AI-generated images was starting to peak, we launched the Post Photographic Project: ten curated artists, each showing one collection made entirely with generative tools. One of them was "Pink. Unidentified. Such a Useless Color!" by Simon Raion. We wanted to bring it back today. ↓ The series pulls you in with a kind of visual softness, then leaves you a little unsettled. Raion builds scenes that feel familiar and hard to place at once: crowded rooms, makeshift dormitories, strange waiting areas. Spaces that seem to hold stories we can't quite access. Pink runs through everything, but it's not the comforting kind. Raion uses it as tension, stripping the color of its usual ties to gender or sweetness. The figures resist easy reading too, shifting between passive and rebellious, challenging how we expect people, and colors, to behave in a photograph. Simon draws on painters like Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, filtered through a lens of social critique. The images read as theatrical and ordinary at once. There's humor at the edges, but it's not easy to laugh. Dr. Linda C. Ehrlich called the collection "oddly stagnant," and that stillness holds more than it lets on.