L’AVANT GALERIE VOSSEN at PARIS PHOTO 2025 in the digital sector, an invitation by Nina Roehrs - Roehrs & Boetsch

Harman’s practice sits at the threshold of a new painterly epoch - what he defines as postpainting. In this expanded field of image-making, the canvas is no longer a site of pure origin but a zone of negotiation between analogue touch and algorithmic vision. Photography, trained AI models, and digital composition act not as replacements for painting but as its provocateurs, generating fragments of possibility that are wrestled back into the material world through the stroke of a brush.

Each image begins with the machine: datasets drawn from lived encounters, photographic archives, and custom-trained AI systems conjure spectral apparitions that shimmer with both memory and error. Yet these algorithmic drafts are not endpoints; they are provocations that demand translation. Harman reasserts the body into this process through hand-painted surfaces, using digital customised brushes designed to echo the idiosyncrasies of his analogue practice. The result is not digital painting, nor traditional painting, but a hybrid form in which the painter’s labour confronts and redeems the hallucinations of the machine.

In this sense, postpainting is not about technology’s triumph but its destabilisation. The work embodies the friction between code and flesh, dataset and gesture, memory and materiality. What emerges are canvases that carry the afterimage of the algorithm while insisting on the irreducible human act of painting, an act of resistance, translation, and renewal.

This practice raises urgent questions about authorship, authenticity, and the future of representation. By weaving together AI’s predictive gaze with the tactility of brush and pigment, Harman constructs images that are both haunted and alive, meditations on how art might survive, and even flourish,amid the accelerating collapse of boundaries between the synthetic and the human.