My investigation into the appeal of contemporary portraiture suggests that reception is driven less by subjecthood than by style, objecthood, and compositional coherence. Anonymous subjects operate as aesthetic motifs and projection-based vessels, producing what I term “anonymous portraits”: works that hover between portraiture and figuration, and that deliberately under-erase the category of the portrait itself.

It is my ethic to work exclusively through hand painting. When questioned about producing prints to increase accessibility, I instead developed a method of hand-painting simulated reproductions within the paintings themselves. I do not wish to propagate my images mechanically, as reproducibility risks rendering them disposable. By contrast, hand-duplicating images within the painting functions as a compositional and conceptual strategy that amplifies the auratic status of the original work while masquerading as reproducible.

Informed by Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Pseudoplicity engineers a recursive system of falseness: each duplication performs the logic of mechanical reproduction, yet each is materially singular and humanly flawed. The copies are false, but the falseness is original.

Pseudoplicity names a performed inauthenticity—a multi-layered system in which simulation, repetition, and concealment operate as aesthetic strategies. The works construct a false reality that is internally coherent and visually harmonious, foregrounding performance as a condition of contemporary subjecthood.

Like the Turing test, where indistinguishability collapses the difference between human and machine output, I position myself as a human production line, replicating my own works through embodied, imperfect repetition.