H𝐮r𝐭s𝐬

The exquisite pains of Marta Blue.

It used to be the hands that gave it away.

Early synthetic art gave us malformed humans; portraits misshapen by rogue fingers and unnatural eyes.

But there was no real pain; only what we could see.

Generated images created horrorshows, but just to us. Based on nothing real, these images were artefacts, exhaust fumes from the process, mistakes.

It begs the question: is there any value in art made without pain?

Yeah, it’s a cliche. The idea that Caravaggio’s singular talent was emboldened by his various strifes; that Emin getting dragged up in Margate made her what she was. I’ve met makers whose magic emerges from having transcended rocky childhoods or other periods of immense pain; others who simply just love to make shit.

It’s not necessarily any easier now to create… but it’s damn easy to create content… so when an operator coldly types in a prompt and produces a florid image - if they don’t cry and we don’t cry, does anyone care?

If what comes out is not a perfect distillation of inner passion but instead something that just exists… is it meaningful? Or does it lack the vital energy we seek in art, as de Boton would have it, is just ‘an empty souvenir’.

Maybe we have become so overfed on content junk that our palates have adjusted.

We tell ourselves there might be tragic machine stories but what are we really seeing? Not the pain of a machine dying, but our own pain; ourselves.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself

Marta Blue has been building a portfolio of work that, among other things, precisely traces these intimacies of pain. A hyper-focused view of the sensory, shot in heightened close-ups.

Sliced flesh and marked skin, tight up amid the sheets or the velvety corners of personal spaces; body portraits with a stench of sweat; hotel rooms of decadent squalor.

Scars ugly and beautiful.

She documents these crafted fantasies to feel both unfamiliar and real.

Or are they real?

We pore over the images out of context, assuming they are fantastical. A part of us recognises the pain as ours; another part, happy to perve on the fantasy. Because to be too real would be haunting, upsetting.

It would remind us of the pain within us, smirk that we feel it too.

Remind us that we choose it, because it’s just us here, human-to-human.

There’s no algorithmic mistake, just what’s come out of us.

It all hurts.

Photography by Marta Blue