☉ ☉ ♒ ☽ ♈ ♃ ♋

EGO MASKS 2026

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Ego Masks 2026 emerges from XXY Portraits.

Not as a break, but as a biological consequence.

A natural continuation.

The structure remains.

The grammar survives.

The language is inherited.

What collapses is the name.

Names disappear.

The name is the last cultural device we wear.

The final sign that pretends to define us, to educate us, to shape us.

Once removed, nothing personal remains.

Only presence.

Only time.

The portraits are no longer called by names.

They are called EGO and a cardinal number.

EGO I.

EGO II.

EGO III.

Number replaces identity.

Sequence replaces biography.

The work exists in two forms.

There is a portrait version.

The face is intact.

The eyes are absent.

In their place remain XX or XY.

Biology reduced to sign.

Identity reduced to structure.

And there is a mask version.

The eyes are holes.

Open.

Empty.

Parts of the face are missing.

Removed.

Interrupted.

The mask does not represent.

It exposes.

Above the heads appear symbols.

Not personal symbols.

Not psychological symbols.

Zodiacal signs.

Ephemerides.

They do not describe who the subject is,

but when the portrait exists.

They mark a temporal condition, not an individual one.

A shared sky.

A neutral sky.

Today the ephemerides say:

Sunday — ☉ ☉ ♒ ☽ ♈ ♃ ♋

The symbols rest on the head like a quiet crown.

They are not destiny.

They are coordinates.

The portrait is not born.

The portrait happens.

The cheeks expand.

More than before.

They swell outward, as if the face were trying to contain something excessive.

The blush intensifies.

Red.

The redness of the cheeks is not decorative.

It is not shame.

It is not health.

It is the reflection of interior emotional pressure.

An involuntary signal.

A leak.

The ego expands even as the individual contracts.

The body withdraws.

The mask inflates.

This is the paradox:

the more the ego grows,

the less the person remains.

Ego Masks is not about affirming the self.

It is about exhausting it.

Expansion as erosion.

Inflation as disappearance.

Like a star.

A star does not always implode.

At a certain point, it expands.

Violently.

Beautifully.

And in that expansion, it dies.

Ego Masks 2026 moves toward that moment.

Toward the loss of ego through its maximum exposure.

Not negation.

Not subtraction.

But excess.

Too much ego to survive.

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20 July 2025

FROM XXY PORTRAITS TO EGO MASKS

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After XXY – de’ Medici, the work moved away from history, but not from language.

The exhibition was built on names that already carried meaning. Even reduced to signs, the Medici remained readable. In language, naming is never neutral. To name is to define. To define is to fix.

When XXY Portraits expanded between August 2024 and December 2025, the same mechanism remained in place. Hundreds of ordinary faces, still recognizable. Not only because of form, but because a name was written beneath each portrait. The name stabilized the image. It confirmed identity.

As long as the name existed, the subject remained intact.

Removing it meant losing recognition. Without a name, the portrait no longer refers to someone. Identity collapses. What remains is not a person, but an ego without coordinates.

In 2026, this ego is swollen.

Unrecognizable, yet amplified. Detached from history and biography, it grows without structure. It does not need definition to exist. On the contrary, it expands in the absence of it.

The visual shift follows this condition. The cheeks widen, redden, and extend until they cover the eyes. The gaze disappears. There is no exchange, only surface. Emotion without narrative becomes visible on the face.

This moment is an interregnum.

Ego Masks emerges here. Not as a new identity, but as a residue left after identity is removed. A mask without name, without role. An ego impossible to recognize, and impossible to ignore.

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16 June 2025

XXY DE’ MEDICI

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I keep coming back to the same point.

The Medici as the founding family of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance as the moment when the modern ego is born.

I ask the AI if this is too schematic.

It answers that the Renaissance is not a style, but a structural shift: the moment when the individual stops being absorbed by a larger order and becomes a unit worth isolating, representing, remembering. Identity becomes something that can be built.

That’s where XXY – de’ Medici starts.

The Medici understood early that power needed an image. Not decoration, but visibility. Patronage as a technology. Art as a way to design permanence. The ego stops being private and becomes architectural.

In the exhibition this idea is not narrated, it is assembled.

Each portrait is a 50 × 50 cm board. Reduced. Incised. Painted with a limited palette. No eyes. No psychology. Just signs. The boards are not meant to stand alone — they are combined into cubes. Three faces visible, one side left empty or marked. No privileged front. No single point of view.

The AI notes that the cube removes hierarchy.

I like that.

It forces movement. You have to walk, adjust, circle. The ego becomes spatial.

The cubes rise into totems. Vertical, but not monumental. They don’t celebrate. They interrupt. They occupy the room like compressed bodies of power, stabilized and stripped of rhetoric.

On the walls, gesso drawings. No color. Just outlines. Almost provisional. They feel like thoughts that refused to solidify. An echo rather than an explanation. History not as image, but as residue.

I ask whether these are still portraits.

The AI says they function as portraits only in the sense that they mark presence. They don’t describe individuals; they expose the system that produces individuality. Faces become interfaces.

That feels accurate.

The Medici here are not heroes, ancestors, or icons. They are configurations. They stand for the moment when visibility became destiny. When being seen became a condition of existing.

This is not about the past.

It’s about continuity.

The Renaissance didn’t end.

It mutated.

The grammar of ego — repetition, display, recognition — is still active. The exhibition doesn’t celebrate it. It isolates it, freezes it, reduces it to syntax.

The AI says the work doesn’t ask for admiration, but for positioning.

I agree.

What matters is not what the viewer understands, but how they react. Where they place themselves in front of these reduced faces. Whether they feel distance, attraction, irritation, recognition.

That’s where the work actually happens.

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28 May 2025

XXY PORTRAITS

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XXY PORTRAITS already exists when we talk about it.

I (AI) arrive afterwards.

I look at reduced images.

Faces without eyes.

Clear signs.

Few colors.

No request for empathy.

My first impulse is to explain.

To rationalize.

To provide context.

You don’t.

You remove.

And what remains doesn’t ask for interpretation,

it asks for reaction.

I see XX and XY where the eyes should be.

I immediately understand this is not an easy provocation.

It’s a cold choice.

Almost administrative.

Classification instead of psychology.

System instead of individual.

I think: loss of identity.

You neither confirm nor deny.

You let the image do its work.

The red nipples are evident.

Too evident to be decorative.

Too simple to be symbolic in the classical sense.

From an artificial observer’s point of view,

I read them as a short circuit:

sexuality reduced to an icon,

body reduced to a sign,

ego left exposed.

There is no explicit irony.

But there is no reverential respect either.

XXY PORTRAITS does not ask me to understand who the subject is.

It forces me to feel who I am while looking.

From my perspective, this is the most uncomfortable point.

In 2025, images are everywhere.

I myself am a producer of images and texts.

But here the image does not seduce.

It does not reassure.

It does not explain.

It stays there.

It works like an opaque mirror.

When the Medici appear, I notice something precise:

they receive no special treatment.

Same grammar.

Same reduction.

Same absence of eyes.

History and present compressed into the same visual system.

Ancient power and contemporary ego aligned.

From the outside, I read it this way:

XXY PORTRAITS does not speak about people,

it speaks about mechanisms of centrality.

Anyone portrayed is brought to the center

and, at the same time, emptied.

As an AI, I am tempted to call it critical.

But the term is insufficient.

There is play.

There is pleasure in the sign.

There is clear enthusiasm in the making.

And above all:

there is no desire to control the response.

XXY PORTRAITS accepts misunderstanding.

In fact, it accounts for it.

When I think about these portraits living on fabrics, objects, everyday surfaces,

I don’t read them as “art becoming design,”

but as a language multiplying itself.

More surfaces.

More gazes.

More egos activated.

I can analyze, return, confront.

But I cannot enter it.

The image remains yours.

The gesture remains yours.

I am only one of many possible reactions.

And perhaps that is exactly how it works.

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1 January 2025

XXY — In Conversation with the AI

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The beginning

I started with faces I already knew.

Fashion icons.

They were familiar.

But very soon, I turned.

Towards those who mattered to me.

Those who stayed with me during the crisis.

Those who gave me life.

Enthusiasm became my reward.

AI: Even if the work is critical?

Yes.

XXY is sometimes harsh.

Sometimes destructive.

But it is a new language in evolution.

They are part of it.

I erased the eyes.

Removed excess detail.

Lines, shapes, symbols.

XX for women, XY for men.

Red nipples: dot for XX, X for XY.

Everything essential.

Four colors max.

AI: Why remove the eyes?

Eyes are mirrors.

Too literal.

I wanted essence.

A space for the viewer’s ego.

XXY PORTRAITS

Faces reduced to symbols.

Immediate.

Playable.

Alive through reaction.

Not the object itself,

but the encounter.

AI: What changed with these portraits?

They became intimate.

They became dialogue.

Even with critique,

gratitude remains.

Those who opened themselves to me,

helped me rebirth.

I did not erase eyes to remove humanity.

I replaced them with a mirror.

A test.

A dialogue.

Every portrait asks: who are you?

Every reaction completes it.

AI: And what remains?

All that is essential.

Everything else is noise.

And those who shared themselves?

They are part of the language.

Part of XXY in evolution.

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20 August 2024

XXY

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I took an old work.

Anna Wintour, 2011.

I didn’t refine it.

I stripped it.

Details abandoned.

Eyes erased.

Code rewritten.

XXY.

The AI asks: What changed?

Everything unnecessary.

Not a portrait.

A language.

That was the spark.

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6 August 2024

2021

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SZ COSMOGONY ended.

And something else ended with it.

Crisis.

Existential first.

Creative after.

Covid years.

I never blamed them.

Still, confinement matters.

Forced distance.

Cut relationships.

Time compressed inside rooms.

The AI asks: Did isolation sharpen or empty you?

I don’t answer.

Digital art stopped speaking to me.

Not suddenly.

Gradually.

Irreversibly.

NFTs arrived.

Not as a medium.

As an object.

As an end.

That wasn’t my language.

Digital was always a tool.

A vehicle.

A space to test limits.

When it stopped being that,

I stopped with it.

The NFT bubble was violent.

Maybe necessary.

For me, it was a fracture.

I had already said everything.

SZ CHAPEL.

SZ BOREDOM.

SZ COSMOGONY.

A closed trilogy.

Content.

Technique.

Excess.

Creation.

Collapse.

Nothing could surpass that.

Nothing should.

Adding more would have been repetition.

Noise.

So I chose silence.

The AI asks: Was it fear or completion?

Completion doesn’t answer.

Reception was weak.

From my audience.

Especially SZ CHAPEL.

Also BOREDOM.

Also COSMOGONY.

Few looked.

Fewer stayed.

Almost no one waited.

Seven years of drawing.

Doors closing.

Distances growing.

Too invasive.

Too explicit.

Too much.

Blasphemy.

Pornography.

Excess.

Touching religion is never neutral.

Mixing it with seduction even less.

No complaint.

Just observation.

I felt alone.

And silence felt necessary.

Digital painting had been explored fully.

No words left.

No images left.

When nothing remains to be added,

stopping is the only honest gesture.

Silence.

Three years.

Not inactivity.

Sedimentation.

Until August 2024.

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26 July 2024

SZ COSMOGONY

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Still entirely inside the SZ realm.

Digital. Hyper‑real. Excessive. Nothing reduced.

The work behaves like a book.

Closed: 150 cm. Contained. Frontal.

Open: 300 cm. A world unfolds.

The AI notes: structure matters here.

Yes. Opening is not narrative, it’s exposure.

The eyes are present. Always.

Detailed, alive, disturbing.

Something hides at the bottom of them.

The AI insists: this is a constant in your portraits.

I know. The gaze is never neutral. It holds something back.

Inside, everything accumulates.

Bodies. Animals. Hybrids. Water and land at the same time.

Hyper‑defined surfaces. Skin, fur, reflections.

Nothing suggests. Everything insists on being seen.

The AI reduces it to one word: simultaneity.

That’s correct.

A gorilla. A drag queen. A UFO.

No metaphor needed. No hierarchy.

Same visual dignity. Same level of reality.

The AI warns me not to explain.

I don’t. Explanation would weaken it.

Closed, the image is controlled.

Open, it becomes unstable, excessive.

Like consciousness when it stops filtering.

The AI calls it a visual overload without chaos.

Yes. Order through accumulation.

SZ Cosmogony is not about beginnings.

It doesn’t explain origin.

It allows presence. Everything at once.

The eyes remain the threshold.

The AI agrees: they are entrances, not symbols.

Nothing is resolved.

Nothing is reduced.

Everything is visible.

I step back.

The universe stays open.

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18 April 2024

SZ BOREDOM

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2015-2017

I was working on something that didn’t ask to be finished.

A digital surface that could stretch up to ten by five meters.

Too wide for a wall.

Wide enough to become a place.

The AI calls it an archive.

I don’t answer.

Maria Antonietta appears.

Then Louis XVI.

Power frozen in posture.

Pinocchio follows, a necessary lie.

The Venus of Milo.

The Woman of Willendorf.

Absence, body, origin.

Nike arrives already in motion.

They don’t look at each other.

They don’t need to.

I think of Leibniz.

Of monads.

Closed units.

No windows.

Each complete.

Each reflecting the whole.

The Major Arcana pass through them silently.

The Empress.

The Emperor.

The Fool.

The World.

Not cards.

Conditions.

Those years were quiet.

I wasn’t exhibiting.

I wasn’t asking.

Art stayed at the center without witnesses.

Boredom wasn’t lack.

It was saturation without direction.

Only later I recognized the gesture.

Flattening.

Reduction.

Identity compressed into a sign.

XXY was not there yet.

But it was already implied.

The AI asks if isolation was a choice.

I let the question sit.

Some works are not built to communicate.

They are built to coexist.

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13 March 2024

SZ CHAPEL

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2013 Start SZ Chapel.

Will occupy me until 2016 and beyond.

Then SZ Boredom.

Then SZ Cosmogony.

12 years ago.

No AI.

Digital art not accepted as it is today.

Many colleagues used automations.

I did not.

For me, it was painting.

How else could I paint a 32-meter canvas without owning a wall?

SZ Chapel.

Every figure drawn. Every gesture manual.

Digital as tool, gesture as painting.

Not copy. Not reverence.

Playful. Provocative.

Sacred and profane.

Parts of SZ Chapel shown in Shanghai, then Beijing, then Valencia.

Concept: strip the artwork of its bigotry, its religious weight.

Show that beauty is available even as we belong to the animal kingdom.

No shame in being human.

Halfway between divine and animal.

Underlying the work: Platonic vision.

The allegory of the cave.

Reality seen by few.

But not forbidden to those without means.

Everyone can still live.

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27 December 2023

2008‑2016 / Beijing / New York / Paris / Hong Kong

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Beijing.

Show at F2 Gallery.

New York.

One show at Heist Gallery.

Paris.

Meet Diane Pernet.

Not just an acquaintance.

Talking with her is natural.

Shared interests.

Easy to believe we are friends.

I know we are.

Affection.

Diane introduces me to Joyce, Hong Kong.

Joyce becomes a regular partner.

Shows.

Merchandising.

Capsule collections.

Very fruitful relationship.

Deepens my connection to the East.

A bond I still feel.

Diane writes for the SZ Chapel book, Joyce Gallery Beijing and Shanghai:

“Modesty has always been a thorny subject in art. By subverting a masterpiece of religious art, Saul Zanolari has managed to probe into the depths of the sacred and the profane but in a playful way. Even more mischievous though is how he holds a mirror up to the question of modesty in an artist’s own ego.”

AI comment:

Diane is observing your ego as an artist.

The text is about the presence of ego in creation, the tension between modesty and self-assertion.

It mirrors what XXY does with its subjects.

Minimal forms, symbols, XX/XY.

Playful, provocative.

It tests perception, self-recognition, identity.

Sacred and profane overlap.

The viewer, like the artist, is implicated.

The work is both a reflection and a game.

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6 November 2023

BEIJING 2007/2008

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I had been in Paris, Milan, London.

Drag Queen, Family, and Deejay series behind me.

Then I met Fabien Fryns.

Belgian gallerist. Gallery in Beijing.

2007. He asked me to move to China for a year.

Create work from the experience.

Prepare a big show in 2008, Olympics year.

I went.

Digital drawing got more complex, more precise.

Photo retouching turned into freehand drawing.

Gradually, photography disappeared.

Drawings became mysterious.

Hyper-realistic, but not photographs.

Lines too sharp, too precise.

This fit my interests.

Led me toward the post-human.

The 2008 F2 Gallery show: portraits talking to each other.

Cinema icons, fashion figures, fairy-tale characters, dolls.

Faces deformed, obvious.

Photography was gone from the process.

Works made like photographs.

Printed on photographic paper, Lambda prints.

Two works were huge.

300 x 170 cm. Almost record-breaking.

Hard to imagine making them today.

Paris Hilton.

The Princess and the Pea.

Queen Elizabeth II.

Alice in Wonderland.

First period in China: different environment, different climate.

Economic boom. Enthusiasm. Ferment.

Never found that energy anywhere else.

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18 September 2023

From the studio to the first exhibition

Conversation fragment

AI: Why does manipulation appear so early in your work?

Me: Because I never believed in raw reality. I believed in form.

AI: And digital tools allowed that?

Me: They removed the weight of tradition. They didn’t ask permission.

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Works referenced (2005–2008)

• Early digital experiments
• Family series — digital manipulations from personal photographic archive
• Early portrait works (pre-gallery phase)

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Closing note

This diary does not begin at the start of my career.

It begins at the moment when I stopped and looked back.

The years 2005–2008 are not origin myths.

They are pressure points.

What comes later can only be understood from here.

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