Artemisia, Matteo Basilé and artificial intelligence trained to dream

Artemisia, Matteo Basilé and artificial intelligence trained to dream

Matteo Basilé is fond of broken clocks, “because they leave room for dreams”. Perhaps this image contains one of the keys to his artistic vision: the tension between what is visible and what escapes the eye, between measurable time and the time of the imagination. It is therefore no surprise that, reflecting on the relationship between humanity and technology, he has said, “Humanism today is a wager on a short circuit: can we still speak of soul, grace, and imagination in the language of machines? I believe we can”.

Born in Rome in 1974 and a member of the distinguished Cascella family of artists, Basilé is regarded as one of the European pioneers in combining photography, digital art, and new technologies. For more than thirty years, he has pursued an artistic exploration that moves along the boundaries between tradition and innovation, the sacred and the contemporary, memory and the future. In his studio, which is a former carpentry workshop on the outskirts of Rome, artificial intelligence has become an integral part of both his creative process and a profoundly poetic artistic inquiry. The artist has explained that he has “trained” AI to see through his own eyes: to understand his treatment of light and his fascination with that delicate threshold where beauty and unease meet.

In several interviews, Basilé has said that what interests him most in portraying a person or a place is “the divine dimension, but also the darker one”. His images do not seek to depict the world as it is; rather, they evoke what lies beneath the surface of things. The many years he spent in Southeast Asia also helped nourish this dialogue between different cultures, spiritual traditions, and imaginative worlds.

The image chosen for the cover of Women Church World belongs to the Artemisia series (2024), part of the Intermundia project. The title refers to a suspended space “between worlds”, where photography, painting, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality enter into dialogue. At its centre is the portrait, a genre that Basilé reinterprets in a contemporary key without severing its connection with the great tradition of Italian figurative art.

The Artemisia images begin with photographic portraits taken by the artist himself and are subsequently reworked using an artificial intelligence system trained on his own visual language. They are therefore not images generated from nothing, but transformations of an original photographic source that retains all of its narrative and symbolic power.

The Artemisia portrayed by Basilé seems to belong simultaneously to a distant past and to a future yet to be imagined. She bears the face of a young woman of today, called Artemisia Levita, a model and actress with long red hair. Yet the allusion to Artemisia Gentileschi is unmistakable. Five centuries later, the great painter continues to embody both artistic genius and personal courage. Within the confined world of seventeenth-century Rome, she was the woman who found the strength to denounce the rape she had suffered and to bring her attacker before a court of law. It was an act of freedom and dignity. A revolution. (r.p.)

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