All Light, No Warmth

Lucas Lugarinho (1992 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) works between video game design and painting, sampling disparate media ecosystems into counter-colonial narratives that explore both mediums' shared history as vehicles for ideology and desire.

In All Light, No Warmth, Lugarinho presents a new body of work where physical painting exercises an aesthetic and playful response to the rise of generative AI images. This series of Ghost Paintings utilizes acrylic medium on highly reflexive fabrics to diffract painting’s shared elements between physical and digital mediums – light, surface and presence – rearranging them into a game of catch. By obscuring the digitizable photographic gaze necessary to feed generative training models, the artist aspires to evoke the ghastly relevance of standing before images in times of accelerated media slop.

Image: Ghost Painting II – Heart Over The Fence (2025)
140 x 110 cm - acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
Photography: Hazan Ozgur Top