Anthony Discenza

Bathers (Water’s Edge)

As the planet is approaching ‘peak population,’ humanity is struggling with a barely repressed anxiety that we have gone too far, that we’re nearing the point of self-annihilation. Discenza’s images capture this sense of the inevitable, near-future cataclysm of entangled throngs in an end-times bacchanal. Scattered among them is a feast rife with carnage suggestive of the fate of all living creatures, a picnic of doomsday binging.

These figures and their day at the beach are rendered in a trans-dimensional way, part photograph, part collage, part painting. As a result, figures appear both photographic and suddenly collaged in two dimensions, a swath of color and a splotch of black paint protrudes from the corner in one image. Using a layered combination of compositional base-images and text-prompts, Discenza has tested the very limits of AI image generators. He does this by repeatedly reprocessing the same image over and again, through different versions and models of Stable Diffusion. After much experimentation, this repeated re-processing allowed Discenza to get results that are notably atypical, by comparison to the increasingly precise and slick output of generative AI. 

This is not the first time that the anxiety of teeming crowds has been made legible in visual art; James Ensor’s paintings depict roving hordes and disharmonic processions that mix military marches, political protests, carnival spectacles, and funeral ceremonies. Discenza’s painterly images reference Ensor’s sensibility for the 21st century, similarly combining motifs of sideshows, beach parties, and scenes of torture. There’s a seductive aspect of disinhibition, of tearing off the clothes in a libidinal frolic, but these acts are being performed by figures abstracted into the monstrous.

This series was commissioned as part of KADIST’s collaboration in Mexico City with the Tamayo Museum, the University of Monterrey and the Material Fair. The images were shown on digital billboards alongside Periferico, one of the largest highway in Mexico City—where they were seen by thousands.