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Paolo Tonon pfp
Paolo Tonon
@paolon
Every day, like clockwork, I selected a headline. Not the one I liked best, not the one that flattered my worldview, but the one that had the most geopolitical weight in the international Western press stream. The news was my ready-made. Duchamp had his urinal, Man Ray his flatiron — I had the BBC homepage and AP wire. And into this brutal, banal modernity, I injected abstraction. Not as escape, but as confrontation. Viewers wrote to me. Some praised the images. Others recoiled at the pairing. “Why ruin this beautiful abstraction with that awful headline? I come to art to forget this world.” And I understood them. But the whole point was: you can’t. Not really. No one lives outside history. No one creates from a vacuum. The news is our weather. Our topsoil. It stains the paper you sketch on, clings to the pixels you arrange, hangs in the room while you work.
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Paolo Tonon pfp
Paolo Tonon
@paolon
I built Present’s Edge with Midjourney, but not in the way most people do — typing prompts and conjuring stylish trivia. I used its *blend* function obsessively, treating each new image as the genetic offspring of the previous days. A visual ecosystem mutating in public. A chain reaction of images whose aesthetic arcs — from cosmic haze to sinister deco, to organic maximalism — weren’t pre-planned but emergent. The way a language evolves, or a folklore spreads. And here’s the secret that hardly anyone caught: these images weren’t entirely abstract. Hidden in the folds of texture and shape were echoes of the source material. A shape lifted from a war photo. A fragment of a propaganda image. A flicker of the actual, gnawing at the edges of the abstract. Because no abstraction is pure. Every form we create is the child of its time.
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