Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, artistically known as Von Wolfe, is an artist that I wasn’t prepared for. It was only in 2024 that I first interviewed the London artist, and comparing the conversations about AI then and now is like going from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in two years. It feels like something so significant in altering our lives has accelerated at a pace that is unfathomable. But Von Wolfe has always been ahead of his time, and he has been noted for navigating “the boundary between digital and tactile realms” with his paintings. He paints in oil. He thinks in digital. Well, at least that is a simple way of putting it.
Familiars is his new show at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, and something about the work feels both fresh and heavy. They are eloquent, rich, masterful works in terms of technique. The world is on notice about how much AI and digital manipulation have taken over our collective aesthetics, but Von Wolfe is still very much a traditionalist; he is a man, in his studio, with oil paint. But Von Wolfe uses AI as an unpredictable source of discovery, a place where he is able to construct a fantastical idea or hybrid of moments and precisely recreate it in real life. It’s almost as if he is painting what tech is seeing, curating the endless algorithm of image-making of the digital universe’s central brain. What was once controversial is now seemingly a frontier that many are trying to cross. We asked a few questions along the journey…
Evan Pricco: When we first talked, years ago, you were one of the first artists I knew working with particular AI and digital systems to create source imagery you would then paint in oil. Now this conversation is at the forefront everywhere. How do you feel about where we are now?
Von Wolfe: I feel like one of the people who crossed early, and I would not trade the crossing for the arrival.
I came to diffusion models in 2021, in the strange quiet after the pandemic, when the world had stopped and the machines had just started. What the early models made was nothing like what they make now. There was no photographic ease. The images were awkward, inconsistent, half drunk. You worked for days to get one image that held together, and when it held, it held with a charge that today's fluency rarely delivers, because nothing in it had yet been smoothed by consensus. The early images were uncanny because they had not learned to be plausible. I miss that. The difficulty was the doorway.
And I was in the engine room, not at the front door. I worked inside the node systems when they were primitive, boxes and wires on a screen like a laboratory bench, and I trained my own models from the beginning, the first LoRAs, before anyone had agreed what they were even for. You take the images you love, with all their strangeness, and you teach the machine to dream further in that direction. Then you take what comes back and teach it again. It is a series of Chinese whispers, and my present style is the last whisper in the chain, still carrying the accent of the first.
There is a story that Raleigh's men, working down the coast of Guiana in a small ship, heard through the forest the grey thunder of a waterfall no European had named. That was 2021. The sound of something enormous, ahead of the map. And the conversation was every bit as intense then as it is now: authorship, craft, theft, the soul, argued with the same heat. What has changed is not the intensity. The mystery has become an industry.
I was among the first to carry these images into oil, and the first problems were the oldest problems. What does craft mean when the proposition arrives apparently finished? The machine hands you a design. The painting still has to be built, light by light, layer by layer, and building it remains the whole of the craft. And I will say this plainly. Training a style with the machine is as difficult and as complex as building one without it. The same problems of taste, proportion and restraint, arrived at from another direction. The machine accelerates the problems. It has never solved one.
EP: It’s a term associated with you, but what is latent realism?
VW: A condition, not a technique.
Latent realism names a world identical to ours except that something imperceptible but fundamental has shifted, and the shift cannot be located, because it is distributed everywhere at once. It is in the light, in the proportions, in the way a woman holds a handstand no body could hold while the room refuses to notice. Magical realism announced its magic. Latent realism denies there is any magic to announce. The impossible sits in the room like a guest who has outstayed his welcome and will not explain why he came.
The word latent does double work. In the models it names latent space, the hidden realm where every possible image waits in superposition, and the technical claim that the variables you cannot observe are still real, still there, merely not yet manifest. In the paintings it names the shift itself: present, active, invisible. Latent means real but not yet revealed. That is the whole condition of the work.
And it is a claim about perception. The paintings pose a question whether they mean to or not. Do we believe what we see, or do we see what we believe? Prolonged looking reveals the disturbance. Every surface carries identical weight, a leaf in front of you as real as the moon behind it. Following Rousseau, I call this ontological equality. Everything matters equally because everything is equally dreamed.
So, latent realism is not a technique. It is the name for the gap between four registers, image, world, perception, ontology, and the fact that they fail to align. That gap is where the painting lives.
EP: For Familiars, give me a little background on how the imagery was created and the genesis of the body of work. I was quite moved by the new colors and the warmer compositions.
VW: The familiar is an old word. In the witch trials it is the spirit that goes about in the shape of an animal and keeps a household: the cat, the hare, the toad at the hearth. But it also means of the household, known, family. I wanted both meanings at once, the demonic and the domestic, because they were never really separate. The dog asleep by the fire has always been a small god.
The title came first, and the paintings spent three years catching up with it. The imagery comes out of the pipeline I have built since 2021: diffusion models fed on my own archive, trained and retrained through those Chinese whispers, producing thousands of candidates from which I select the few that hum with a quiet charge. Then the translation. Grisaille first, the whole picture in greys, the light decided before colour is allowed to exist. Then glaze upon glaze, months to a canvas, the fifteenth century doing what the twenty-first cannot.
What the paintings are about took longer to say. The show grew out of a lifelong preoccupation with powerful psychological relationships between women in interiors. Corners of rooms. Deep shadow. Windows that admit a light the room has not obviously earned. I wanted an exhibition about inside and outside: the window as threshold, the balcony, the night beyond the glass. In The Balustrade a woman sits contained in gold while a dark landscape waits outside the opening. In Reflected Inversion a handstand inverts the body while a church steeple beyond the window answers her vertical, up where she points down. The whole exhibition is a negotiation between the room and whatever lies past the glass.
And the animals carry what the women withhold. The egret on the chair back in Night Visitor. The owl at the pearl collar in The Vigil. The cat on its hemp rope in Tethered Light. Pet, watcher, double. Not symbols; the work refers only to itself. They are presences, and they know more than they say.
You were moved by the colour. So was I, which surprised me. After years of dark grounds and cold greys I let the mustard yellows and the golds in. The rooms warmed because the psychological temperature of the work had changed, and the paint had to follow. This is the first body of work where composition and colour developed as a single argument, and the warmth is part of the argument. These rooms are not cold, even when they are difficult.
EP: There is an interesting story about how these works were made, and about Hollywood, its struggles with and adaptation to new technologies that are replacing handmade artistry and jobs in the film industry. What you do is not replacing the artist at all, just enhancing what your hand can do. Did that Los Angeles backdrop come into mind when you made this work?
VW: Los Angeles is a city that does not know whether it is real. If that is not a latent realist landscape, I do not know what is. The orange grove, the silver screen, the endless highway delivering you to a Pacific that delivers nothing it promised. The sign precedes the referent. The image comes before the thing. Los Angeles is a backlot that forgot it was supposed to be fictional. I made these paintings before I knew where they were going, and when they arrived they were perfectly at home.
David Lynch understood that city better than anyone. His Los Angeles is the dream factory turned on itself, the house that is exactly your house except that something in it is wrong. That is the uncanny, Freud's unheimlich, the familiar becoming strange, and it is also the mechanism of my paintings: a room entirely credible except for the one thing that cannot be, rendered with enough optical conviction that you are denied permission to disbelieve. Mulholland Drive does in time what I am attempting in stillness.
And yes, the backdrop was present while I worked. The industry that surrounds the gallery has spent these last years at war with the machine: strikes over what happens to writers and actors, to the concept artists and craftspeople whose hands built every world that town ever sold. The fear is replacement, and the fear is not stupid. But my practice sits inside that argument as a counterproposal. The machine produced a proposition. What hangs on the wall is four hundred hours of hand, grisaille, glaze and argument. I am proof of a division of labour, not of a replacement. The machine extends what the hand can reach. It does not hold the brush.
Hollywood's anxiety is the painting world's anxiety with the volume turned up. The oldest crafts absorb the newest machines badly, loudly, and then permanently. The question was never whether the machine can make images. It is who chooses, who finishes, and where the weight of decision lives. In my studio that question has one answer, and it has had it for five hundred years.
EP: How do you feel about the world of contemporary painting at the moment? We were both at Frieze. What are your thoughts on the state of painting as we see it now?
VW: You and I walked the same tent. I guess the doctrine is the interesting part.
The first doctrine is the gesture. There is an economy of contemporary painting built on disclosed artifice, the failed gesture, the uncertain mark, the visible brushwork that says this is a construction, do not mistake it for reality. It is made by genuine painters working the hesitant mark with real intelligence, and the currency the economy trades in is the belief that authenticity lives in hesitation. I stand apart from that belief, not in opposition but in difference. For a thousand years of Western painting the process occupied the background; the icon carried weight without showing the hand. The gestural is a fashion, two centuries old at most, and we have mistaken it for the definition of the authentic. The awkwardness has itself become a style, collectable, photographable, safe. A mark that apologises for itself is still performing.
So, the state of painting. In craft it is healthier than it has been for decades. In doctrine it is answering the machine's question, what can you do that this cannot, from several directions at once. Some answer from inside the mark. Others answer from inside the body. I answer from outside the image, at the point where a face looks back and declines to explain itself. I do not believe there is one correct answer. The tent was full of honest ones, and the best of them will still be standing when the noise has moved on.
Another doctrine of the fair was lineage, and a booth made the argument in metal, a lattice around its painter, hung with the artists she looks at: Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Hans Bellmer, a century of drawings hung like ancestors called in to vouch for the living. I found it eloquent, and also slightly funny, because painters have always done this quietly. The practice for a painter has always been to take art history into the work and push it forwards into the twenty-first century. The machine did not introduce the habit; it inherited it. If the fair had a single theme, it was this: the past is no longer behind the present but around it, and the strongest booths were the ones that admitted it. Their lineage hangs on a grid. Mine is dissolved in the training data, arriving not as quotation but as instinct. Same faith, different vessel.
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