Infernalis

A corridor of stillness

Infernalis began with a simple picture: a long corridor, lit just enough to see, lined on both sides with portraits. No names on the frames. No plaques. Just people, standing or sitting very still.

From there, the questions followed. What if the entire collection came from this place? What if every image was another room, another doorway, another wall in the same building? What if the only things that never changed were the pallor of the skin and the red of the lips — not as a symbol, but as a way of saying: you are still in the same world?

The project chose quiet over spectacle. No shock, no grotesque distortion. The drama is in the pause before anything happens, the sense that each person has already lived a full life before you arrive and will go on existing after you pass by.

Painter's choices, coded into a house

Underneath the fiction of the building is a very practical set of decisions.

Gender and age are ways to vary bone structure, posture and the weight of a gaze. Hair appears as an occasional flare of intention — dark, pale, red — or disappears under hoods and collars. Eyes determine mood: friendly, distant, wary, unreadable. Clothes define silhouette and texture: structured cloaks, soft shawls, high collars, layered fabrics that catch the light in different ways. Settings give the portraits somewhere to breathe: hallways, courtyards, terraces, interiors that feel borrowed from many cities and none in particular.

What begins as a list of traits turns into something more like architecture. The system is not building single characters; it is building a place where those characters might plausibly stand.

Fine-art generative

Infernalis leans toward painting rather than illustration. Faces are rendered with enough realism to feel specific, but the surface never hides its brushwork. Light behaves as it does in a studio or a quiet street: falling across faces, catching cloth, fading into the upper reaches of a wall.

The generative process is there in the background — choosing, combining, recombining — but the aim is that you notice the people first. The collection is not about showing off variety for its own sake. It is about returning, again and again, to the same simple act: one person, in one place, allowing themselves to be seen.

In that sense, Infernalis is less concerned with the machinery of art and more with the modest, difficult thing at its centre: presence. A corridor of witness, built out of code and paint.