As a self-described formalist, David Lloyd has spent decades wrestling with painting and its memetic consequences. He has made narrative and abstract work, expanded chromatic boundaries, and incorporated sculptural concerns by moving away from traditional supports such as canvas and linen in favor of expanding urethane foam, felt, and Astroturf, among other unconventional materials. However, for In The Beginning, Lloyd has ventured into an entirely different class of material. Every piece is a product, in part, of generative AI. 

Lloyd is not the first artist to incorporate generative AI into his practice, and SPY Projects is not the first gallery to exhibit AI-generated art. Notably, last year, Gagosian Beverly Hills showed a collection of AI-generated prints produced by filmmaker Bennet Miller using an unreleased beta version of OpenAI’s DALE-E, given to him by the companies CEO: Sam Altman. Much like the text you’re reading right now, the exhibition was but part of a PR campaign. While the sepia-toned photo-likes weren’t terrible, they’re our first introduction to the “AI aesthetic” at its most identifiable form—  interpretations of the human body. It is passing realism at a glance, preceding inevitable deviations from physical law, and a frictionless relationship between subject and environment. Truly uncanny.

David Lloyd approaches the medium with something that Miller, and perhaps no other AI artist, can claim: decades making paintings and sculptures IRL, and the veritable library of photo-documentation that accompanies such a career.

Lloyd’s AI was trained entirely on paintings and sculptures created by Lloyd himself. He feeds the engine photos of his own work, then asks it to re-produce them. The result is inkjet printed, then cut apart, painted, collaged and airbrushed on top of before it is photographed and fed back to the AI. This process is akin to a recursive metabolism, crossing the boundaries of meatspace and cyber-reality and the physical trauma shatters the image into pieces. Reincorporates it. Collapses it. Then the whole process repeats, driven that much further by 21st- century technological means, yet occurring at the meandering pace of traditional studio painting. The result is a fully formed physical object, rendered in equal parts with paint and AI.

The work is steeped in artifice –- a collage of illusionary depths and non-euclidian forms, thinly wrapped in what is AI’s most recognizable aesthetic contribution to the body of work at hand: a thick satin coat that shines like the glossiest finish of a souped-up lowrider.

Lloyd does something very different here than faithfully commit the regurgitations of a lunatic algorithm to three dimensional space. He wrenches into physical reality what could otherwise only exist digitally. He embraces the inherently alienating quality of AI generated images, yet armed with the experience of his craft and human honesty, he renders them into something that is recognizably another step forward in painting- a medium that despite its 5000 year lineage, our species remains so enamored with.