Surreal but serene. Recent but timeless. Trendy but outlandish. Lonely but contented. Maybe it is the tensions in Franki Domino’s illustrations that function the start line for the narratives he goals to create. They’re actually beginning conversations, as is his image-making approach.
Though you may not comprehend it, Franki makes use of synthetic intelligence fashions to create his artworks. This would possibly make some fellow illustrators wince, however maintain studying, and take a look on the work. His strategy is so painstaking, refined and nicely thought out that the work can’t be dismissed.
“I’m the alter ego of Julien Pacaud, a digital collage artist,” says Franki. “I spent 20 years creating artwork from pre-existing supplies, particularly classic images, earlier than I started integrating AI in 2021. I created the Franki Domino identification in 2023 once I felt prepared to supply absolutely AI-generated artworks, separate from my established collage apply.”
Based mostly in Paris, Franki collaborates together with his Julien persona, who initially skilled in movie, his past love. Collectively, they’ve made Cult Zero – an summary brief that sees the round type of the Earth change into a metaphor for the whole lot and nothing. It’s poetic, profound, unnerving, and complicated, with an experimental aesthetic in contrast to the generic AI-based art work on the market.
“AI is able to rather more than folks assume by way of stylistic exploration, however unlocking that potential takes lots of time and trial and error,” explains Franki. “I spend a major quantity of power attempting to bend the AI outputs, steering them away from the usual biases or the precise AI look that the fashions naturally produce. It’s much like my background in digital collage, the place I all the time looked for an ambiguous house between collage and images.”
Franki’s main software is Midjourney for its stylistic vary, and he makes use of Nano Banana and Flux when he wants one thing particular. As he good points proficiency, he is including choose items to his portfolio, selecting up business commissions, and is now represented by the company Colagene. One in all his current commissions was a poster for the music competition Les Siestes Teriaki.
Whether or not working within the business world or creating high-quality artwork, there’s an comprehensible want for an artist to develop a recognisable model with authentic, particular person traits to set it aside. Nonetheless, he does not consider in visible guidelines and says that any coherence we detect is right down to the unconscious decisions he makes as he grows the Franki Domino universe.
“My inspiration is what I name a ‘magma’, a combination of the whole lot I’ve seen, learn, heard or skilled since I’ve been alive – artwork, movies, books and music. This psychological archive guides my decisions principally unconsciously. Due to my background, I’m strongly influenced by cinema and fiction. I do not search for particular traits; as an alternative, I depend on intuition to take the primary steps,” he says.
Alongside this sum of sounds, visuals, sensations and emotions, generative AI represents a machine that an artist can use to create all potential pictures. In Franki’s biography on his agent’s web site, it says that “…he envisions his work as a collaboration, with the machine serving to allow the realisation of a private imaginative and prescient imbued with a distinctly human sensitivity.”
This can be a far cry from the AI imagery we encounter day in and time out, and that is exactly why Franki Domino’s seems like the beginning of a brand new narrative for the know-how.
