Von Wolfe: Continuums in Dialogue

London based artist Von Wolfe works where oil meets algorithm. Trained in philosophy at NYU, he builds images like arguments, treating history as a living archive rather than a fixed reference. His portraits slow the churn of self-images and return the viewer to duration, presence, and the fragile depth of being human.

The process begins with computation. Wolfe trains custom LoRA models on his own archive until strange outliers appear, then edits and translates those forms to canvas, where touch gives them weight. Clothing reads as psychological architecture, site can become a collaborator, and music and literature set the tempo. The point is not to dissolve the tension between mediums, but to let them speak to each other in real time.

hube: You studied philosophy at NYU before fully entering the world of art. How has that philosophical foundation shaped the way you construct images?

Von Wolfe: Philosophy trains you to look at the structures behind what appears obvious — to question not just what something means, but how meaning itself is produced.

Thinkers like Wittgenstein or Derrida remind us that meaning is always shifting, never fixed, and my work mirrors this by placing historical, cultural, and technological images into constant dialogue. For me, art is less about providing answers than creating a space of questioning.

h: Your work carries the gravity of history yet resists nostalgia. How do you engage with the past as a living archive rather than a fixed reference?

VW: I regard history as a continuum rather than a distant past — a living archive where the same fundamental questions of human existence continually resurface. Themes such as love, grief, faith, or the struggle for freedom are not bound to one era; they recur in different guises across time. My work seeks to reactivate these motifs, translating them into forms that resonate with the present while retaining their timeless gravity. In this way, the past is not something to be nostalgically preserved but a vital source through which we can better understand both ourselves and the world we inhabit today.

h: Portraiture has long served to immortalize, idealize, or expose. What do you think its role is today?

VW: In an age overwhelmed by self-images, portraits risk becoming disposable, endlessly replicated, and consumed. Yet painting resists that ephemerality. A portrait slows time asking both artist and viewer to dwell in presence rather than immediacy; unlike the fleeting image on a screen, a portrait in oil insists on duration. Today, the role of portraiture is not simply to immortalize or flatter but to cut through the noise of simulation, reminding us of the depth and fragility of being human.

h: Has there been a particular space, a city, room, or context, where showing your work felt especially resonant? How does site affect how you understand or present your practice?

VW: When I was making The Raft of the Medusa (The Journeys End) in Rome, a thunderstorm broke over the city. The studio was in the same quarter where Géricault had once lived and worked, and the air felt thick with his ghost. The rain hammered the skylight, the light fractured into silver flashes, and every crash of thunder seemed to charge the canvas with the drama of the scene I was painting. The setting felt less like a backdrop and more like a collaborator; the city, the storm, and the history embedded in those streets all folding into the work. In that moment, the site didn’t just influence my practice; it became inseparable from it, as if place, weather, and subject had fused into a single atmosphere of creation.

h: How do you navigate the line between theatricality and intimacy?

VW: I am always conscious of holding a balance between what is seen and what is felt. Theatricality has its place in painting — the gesture, the colour, the composition — but if it overwhelms, it can close off the more subtle registers of experience. I try to let intensity emerge through restraint, so that the drama is not only on the surface but also in the silences between forms, in what remains unspoken.

I often find the most powerful images are those that suggest more than they declare. By allowing space for ambiguity, I hope to create paintings that invite intimacy — works that open inward rather than shout outward.

h: Is there a particular piece of music, composer, or genre that feels visually resonant for you?

VW: I have always felt a deep visual kinship with music that unites structural precision with emotional intensity – Monteverdi’s madrigals, Hildegard of Bingen’s luminous, otherworldly chants, Gesualdo’s harmonies forever poised between ecstasy and violence. These composers understood tension, suspension, and release in a way that mirrors how I think about light, form, and space on canvas. Having composed concertos for piano, oboe, and violin, I tend to approach painting with a musician’s ear for counterpoint and phrasing. In my work with time-based media, I am drawn to soundscapes more akin to the haunting cadences of Metropolis, the dreamlike atmospheres of Tarkovsky, or even the strange, propulsive allure of Cerrone’s Supernature or Donna Summer at her most hypnotic. What matters is not period or genre, but that the music feels uncanny and out of time, navigating sideways through reality, much as Murakami does in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

h: Are there particular writers or poets whose work lingers in your imagination, not necessarily as direct references, but as companions in tone or spirit?

VW: I’ve always been drawn to writers who understand the movement between despair and renewal — Tolstoy, Bellow, Fitzgerald, Euripides. One passage I return to often is from War and Peace, when Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, after a period of deep disillusionment, sees again the great oak he once thought dead: gnarled, lifeless, a reflection of his own emptiness. Later, after meeting Natasha Rostova, he finds the same tree transformed — covered in young leaves, vibrant, alive. It’s a moment where the external world and inner life fuse completely, and the change in perception becomes the change in self. That image, of a tree reborn in spring, holds as much truth for me as any philosophy.

h: Your work often evokes a world suspended between eras. How do you think about time when composing an image?

VW: Time, for me, is never linear — it is layered, recursive, and constantly folding back on itself. When composing an image, I think of it less as placing something within a fixed chronology and more as staging an encounter where different eras overlap. A Renaissance gesture, a contemporary sensibility, and a digital trace can all coexist within the same visual field, each destabilizing the other.

In that sense, painting becomes a way to collapse temporal boundaries, or at least to show that they are porous. What we call “the past” is always speaking in the present, just as the present is already anticipating the future. A painting can hold all of these temporalities at once, which is perhaps why it continues to feel timeless: it belongs to no single moment, and yet it is emotionally precise in the one who beholds it.

h: Oil painting has historically been linked to power, permanence, and representation. Do you feel connected to the medium or are you more interested in its emotional charge?

VW: Dante imagined bankers in hell condemned to move their hands endlessly, punished for a life in which they never laboured with them. I still believe in the phenomenology of using the body in the world — the knowledge and presence that comes from craft. I can imagine, millions of years from now, a distant civilisation studying Bernini in his greenhouse at Versailles, labouring over his marble bust of Louis XIV, analysing his gestures as if through the lens of Alex Garland’s Devs, when Christ’s final moments are reconstructed from the air itself. They would see that his bodily movements were inseparable from the making of the work. For me, it is not the power or symbolism of oil painting that matters, but the act itself — the physical, embodied process through which art comes into being.

h: How do you think about costume or dress in your work? Is fashion ever a form of narrative or psychological framing for you?

VW: In my paintings, clothing intentionally acts as psychological architecture around the figure. Dress has always carried symbolic weight, from sacred vestments to contemporary fashion, shaping how identity is seen and performed. In my work, costumes often exaggerate or distort this role: they can suggest power, vulnerability, or estrangement, sometimes all at once. I think of fashion less as ornament and more as narrative.

A garment can frame a character’s inner state just as much as their outward appearance, becoming a lens through which we read their presence.

h: Do you see yourself as working within a tradition or resisting one?

VW: I see myself as an adept, like someone gazing into a crucible and glimpsing all of time coexisting in a single room. The artist I feel closest to might be Phidias — the timeless, extraordinary presence of Athena in her chryselephantine form, almost animated by the liquid pools of olive oil beneath her sculpture — or a Magdalenian painter deep in a cave, peering into the rock face and seeing strange and wondrous forms emerge. And, of course, Leonardo, whose restless curiosity and fusion of art and inquiry seem to stand outside time itself.

h: Your work feels deeply composed, but also intuitive. What does your process look like from concept to canvas? Do ideas arrive as images, texts, emotions?

VW: My process often begins with computation rather than canvas. Using an RTX 4090, I train custom LoRA models on an archive of my past works, repeatedly retraining and refining until new visual “outliers” begin to emerge. These are the images that resist easy categorization — the ones that feel both strange and timeless — and they become the starting point for further post-production, where I sharpen, recompose, and adjust their internal logic.

At that point, the process shifts, and I translate the digital forms into oil on canvas. The AI stage gives me a vast field of possibilities, while painting gives the image gravity and permanence. Both are essential: one is a collaborator, the other crystallizes. The final work exists because of their dialogue, not in spite of it.