This series continues the previous one: the work is built in dialogue with AIs — no longer image generators, but interlocutors. The machine critiques, the painter paints, the trace stays open. The artist returns to the forms he had forbidden himself — the monsters, the naive shapes, the black triangle on blue, and matter. Forbidden because too easy, too bare: these are the forms of childhood and of the young painter, kept in the hand beneath the craft. He returns to them knowingly, with the years of painting fully assumed, trying to rebuild a vocabulary of his own, to erase any superfluous charm or magic trick, learning from simple forms that radiate an aura, learning to stop early.
These canvases — both series together — span almost five years, a long time for a painter who always painted fast. Landscapes turned into memory-places. The painting becomes abstract for that reason, not as a formal choice: memory is abstract. A memory does not archive, it reconstructs — no perspective, one dominant colour, a mass, a light, half erased, repainted at every recall. Past a certain point in a life, everyone carries an inner world more populated than the world in front of them. That is the one the painter now turns to: the slow return to the inner world.
The title Hell Can't Be That Bad sets the tone: no alarm, no nostalgia, no lament. The world has already tipped over, the painter's too; and that observation rests rather than frightens, like pressure easing once the die is cast.