Possible Selves

Arturo Arvizu chooses to work with AI as a tool for stimulating creativity. Arvizu’s practice is rooted in painting; for years, the artist worked predominantly in oil on canvas, developing a figurative language centered on the body, identity, and presence. The direct relationship between hand, matter, and image remains essential to his approach. The introduction of artificial intelligence into his process does not mark a shift in direction, but rather an expansion of this visual inquiry toward a new type of instrument. The result is a series of scenarios of possible lives, projections of destinies that belong to no one and, at the same time, to everyone. Just as for Michel Foucault the body was a field of inscription for power, in Arvizu’s work, the future appears as a field of inscription for data: a space where the power to calculate and the power to dream converge.
The artist constructs this reflection through a multimedia approach: painting, video, and installation. Painting functions as an anchor in tradition; the surface of the canvas preserves the gesture, the layering, the hesitation, and the revision, reminding us that, beyond the algorithm, there remains a hand that selects, corrects, rejects, and creates. The video introduces the dimension of the fluid present: sequences of images that transform slowly or abruptly, frames that seem to capture fragments of dreams, reality tests, and screens on which the future is never clear, but always in the process of becoming. The installation extends this universe into physical space, inviting the viewer’s body to engage with these scenarios. The video works transform the viewer into an active participant: the time spent before a screen becomes part of the "writing" of the work. Thus, the visitor is no longer a passive consumer of images, but a co-author of borrowed futures, lived intensely for a few moments, then left behind, like a dream that continues to resonate within the memory.

Arturo Arvizu invites us to reflect on our relationship with time, identity, and community. The future, as presented here, is an open field of negotiation in which each visitor is invited to assume, if only for a moment, the responsibility of their own borrowed futures. Within the context of Romanian Creative Week and the presentation at Artep Gallery, this exhibition proposes a compelling dialogue between a consolidated pictorial practice and the emerging technological tools shaping global visual culture. Arturo Arvizu’s presence brings a perspective where technology is neither celebrated nor demonized, but critically integrated into an already mature artistic process.