Beauty is no longer a mirror - it’s an algorithm pulsing between flesh and code. Classical bodies and synthetic figures chase each other like in a lucid dream: ancient harmony gives way to a taut aesthetics where emotion meets calculation and the past reflects on digital surfaces. On this shifting threshold, the artwork isn’t merely contemplated: it calls you in, asking you to choose a side. Thus arrives Artificial Beauty, the first major Milan survey dedicated to Andrea Crespi, curated by Alisia Viola and Sandie Zanini. Following shows at Triennale, CAFA in Beijing, MAGA, Times Square, and Art Dubai, the artist presents a laboratory of hybrid imagination: painting, sculpture, installations, and digital works compose a narrative in which every piece also functions as a relational device. It opens with The Artist, a set of open questions about authorship in the age of AI. Signature works follow, including Ex Human, portraits born from the grafting of generative systems and human iconographic codes, Beauty Lives in Every Story – Venus of the Books, an allegory of knowledge that fuses paper and machine, Head of Aphrodite, a reinvention of the Venus de Milo, and Amore & Psiche / Artificial & Physical, a monumental embrace multiplied by mirror-lined environments.
For the curators, it is an observatory on cultural evolution, for Crespi, a practice of self-inquiry that jolts the gaze. The result? A journey into the elsewhere of dichotomy - human/machine, memory/future - that, with vertigo and precision, redefines what we call beauty today.
