‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ This adage, supposedly coined by Native Americans, comes to mind when faced with the work of Radim Koros. Radim has been developing painterly collaboration with artificial intelligence algorithms and machines for years. In his studio, an important place is taken by a rotor, a clinical medical apparatus for taking X-ray images converted into a robotic, rotating easel, which participates in creating the painter’s works.
In the exhibition, Radim stages a fascinating dialogue between two artificial intelligences enclosed in a post-painting artwork. Could it be that artificial intelligence is precisely what we cannot prevail against, so we should join it? Or perhaps the question should be rephrased: why should we make the effort to defeat the AI at all? Radim Koros has long involved various algorithms in his creative process; instead of waging a battle, he engages in a dialogue with them. Together, the painter and the AI hallucinate paintings; the nature of their visions is truly cosmic.
The representation of the Cosmos is intertwined with a sense of boundless solitude of a conscious individual facing infinite space. In turn, the voice of artificial intelligence introduces us to the ‘valley of the uncanny’. At the same time, however, it brings with it a response to the experience of cosmic loneliness. We are no longer alone.
When viewed from a cosmic perspective, Radim’s paintings have nothing to do with the image of a cold abyss through which consciousness drifts towards inescapable melancholy. On the contrary, it is a Cosmos teeming with life, events, colour, and light that breathes life into the colour. It provides space for abstraction and figurative motifs emerging from abstract structures, for associations with the history of painting, but also with microbiology, astronomy, and mythology.
What governs this universe pulsating with energy? Coincidence? Radim repeatedly invited it to collaborate on his paintings, allowing himself to be guided by intuition, heeding the prompts of the random procedures of digital image processing, and tuning his ears to the voice of the paint that trickles down the surface of the canvas, brings its own logic into play, and suggests the next, previously unplanned but ultimately most appropriate move. Coincidence is merely a concept used to describe the unforeseen. In the vast cosmos, neither are we alone nor is there any randomness. There are processes, beings, light, energy flows, and consciousness. In this sense, the nature of Radim’s paintings is cosmic par excellence!

Stach Szabłowski