Baroque Idol / Relay System originates from the large canvas Scrape Offering / 72 x 36’ (inv. 8APMMC16187236), an early gestural abstraction from The Ascension Codex where scraped marks, transfers and rough texture stage a kind of spiritual excavation. A photograph of that painting is fed into an early generative app together with a compact text prompt, allowing the system to misread its grit and scars into this hyper constructed body: a figure in pale armor, shoulders flaring out in perforated fins, chest and arms wrapped in a latticed second skin.

The raw digital file carries more visible seams and distortions, but when it is printed directly onto Fujifilm Instax Mini film the chemistry softens the rendering into a small glossy relic. Lightning like marks at the edges and a mottled black and orange patch near the bottom keep the connection to the original scraped canvas alive, as if pieces of that older painting have burned through the new image. The “Baroque Idol” half of the title speaks to the theatrical, over specified costume, while “Relay System” names the way this figure carries information forward from a 2012 abstraction into the AI era. The work introduces the Deities and Oddities. sequence as a whole: divinity here is engineered, glitch born and routed through bodies that never quite settle.

AI generated image printed on Fujifilm Instax Mini color film, 1/1, created using a photograph of the acrylic painting Scrape Offering / 72 x 36’ (inv. 8APMMC16187236, from The Ascension Codex, subseries Make Me Pure Just Not Yet) as image input with text prompt, printed directly onto instant film.