Copy of a Copy

(Contact Sheets)

“Copy of a Copy” consists of large-format contact sheets – perforated, numbered, printed on black photo paper and featuring exactly 42 small images arranged in a strict grid.

Yet these images do not come from any camera. They were generated algorithmically with AI: from a single, precisely formulated text that scours and distills an enormous image database. Each contact sheet is based exclusively on this one “prompt”. The AI produces dozens of minimally varying versions of one and the same motif from it.

The images repeat compulsively – and yet are never identical. None is completely like another, yet they are all alike and it is precisely for this reason that the eye instinctively searches for the one perfect image, the decisive moment that outshines all the others. It does not exist. Instead: an endless round of the finest deviations, a hypnotic loop of sameness.

This obsessive repetition is the actual subject – the ever-identical self-replication presented as diversity, until the gaze grows tired and still cannot let go.

Synthography itself is already a copy of photography; analog photography was long considered a direct copy of reality; and within the contact sheet every image is a copy of its neighbor. Here now lie 42 versions of a moment that never took place. None of the people depicted ever lived, not a single moment ever actually took place. Everything is pure imitation – a flawless deception.

Each sheet also carries its own poetic fragment – a text that does not explain the images but circles them poetically, condenses their mood and creates an additional layer of resonance.

An irritating state of suspension arises: the soulful nostalgia of the analog contact sheet meets the smooth, usually flawless perfection of synthetic images – and it is exactly in this fissure that desire, doubt and a quiet mourning for something lost collide.

A homage to the original. A deliberate forgery. A meditation on repetition, emptiness and the longing for the real. And perhaps – right at the edge – a tiny remnant of soul, hiding precisely within the endless copy.

Everything you see is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy…

It is exactly in this that its uncanny, irresistible truth lies.

Medium: Digital Collage / Synthography, 2026

Edition of 1 (Each image is a unique, one-of-a-kind work).

Size: 165 × 132 cm / 65x52in

Hand-signed and dated by the artist.

Ongoing project.