Fusion Art

Fusion Art is a hybrid process of generative AI and digital collage by hand. The AI supplies the raw material: dozens of image variations per work. The work itself emerges afterwards, layer by layer, through selecting, isolating, superimposing and discarding. The model supplies the vocabulary. The composition and every decision about what stays and what disappears are the artist’s.

Mysterium Tremendum

From a distance, you see the sublime. Clouds and wings, gold and ornament, celestial bodies in the dark. Step closer and something else appears: bodies that are not ascending but falling. Faces coming apart. Skulls where a moment ago there was only decoration.

Mysterium Tremendum is about faith, seen from both sides. The strength it gives and the price it asks. Comfort and doubt. It does not speak of one religion but of every form of belief: in a god, in an order of the world, in beauty itself. The motifs change from work to work, from the heavens of sacred painting to the still life of transience and out into the cosmos. The feeling remains the same.

Each work is made to be viewed more than once. Beauty and horror do not sit side by side. They sit inside one another.

The Title

The term was coined by the German theologian and scholar of religion Rudolf Otto. In his book “The Idea of the Holy” (1917), he describes the experience of the divine as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”: a mystery that makes us tremble and draws us irresistibly at the same time. Otto found this double experience in all religions.

The Process

Generative AI was used to produce the raw visual material, not the finished work. For each piece in the series, I generated material across dozens of prompts and prompt variations, systematically shifting what carries the image: the architecture, the density of figures, the light, the palette, the degree of decay. Each time, the result was a body of material with a consistent visual language but no single usable image in it.

The finished piece was built by hand. I extracted fragments from these generations (individual figures, wings, faces, architectural elements, passages of ornament and texture) and composited them across many layers, controlling the result through blending modes, opacity, masking and manual retouching. Areas were removed, others intensified. Each layer was chosen and positioned deliberately: where the light falls, where the surface thickens and where it tears open, which figures remain legible and which dissolve into the surface.

This process takes hours, sometimes days. It ends only when the image shows one thing from a distance and another up close.

The model supplied the vocabulary. The composition, the hierarchy, the colour architecture and every decision about what stays and what disappears are mine. No generated image has been carried over into a work as a whole. Where individual areas remain recognisable, they were chosen deliberately and placed in a new context.

Prints

• 7 works
• Limited edition: 1 print per work, plus 1 artist’s proof each
• 14 prints in total
• Signed
• Includes certificate
• Available in custom sizes, from 30 × 45 cm to 110 × 165 cm
• Fine art gallery print