In Ais II, a reinterpretation of Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Vivian Greven juxtaposes the continuity of classical sculpture with the fracture of post-digital image-making. The rounded marble bodies of the original become smooth, poreless surfaces—neither painterly nor sculptural, but reminiscent of digitally rendered skin. Onto this perfected surface she introduces a strikingly incongruent red arm, whose color and materiality belong neither to Cupid nor Psyche. This interruption breaks the unity of the classical embrace, asserting itself as a foreign—and distinctly contemporary—presence.
The red hand functions simultaneously as insertion and rupture. Mirroring the red accent at the bottom of the canvas, it serves as a structural fracture, akin to an added frame, layer, or mask in digital editing. The gesture suggests that the intimacy we perceive is not naturally occurring but constructed within an image system—cropped, filtered, and re-coded. Through this intrusion, Greven transforms the mythic bodies into “image bodies,” shifting them from the realm of sculptural flesh to that of endlessly reproduced visual icons.
As Julien Delagrange notes in A New Visual Tendency in Painting, contemporary painters increasingly adopt a “post-digital aesthetic”: surfaces appear immaculate and seamless, yet are punctured by visual glitches, misalignments, and suspended narratives that reveal their artificiality. Greven’s painting exemplifies this tendency. The mythological encounter becomes hyper-polished, almost too perfect, carrying the synthetic sheen of something reproduced rather than lived. Intimacy becomes an image event—constructed, fragmented, and repeatedly retold.
Although the figures lean toward each other, their unity is undone by the red hand. This foreign limb—unclaimed by any body within the scene—emerges as an index of contemporary image culture: a fragment without origin, an external intervention, a visual residue of digital recomposition. In Greven’s hands, myth is no longer a narrative to be illustrated but a visual code to be re-scripted. The sculptural embrace becomes a symbolic motif reframed within contemporary image circulation, where bodies lose weight, intimacy loses continuity, and both are transformed into smooth, interruptible surfaces.
This is where Greven’s contemporary relevance lies: she uses classical bodies to speak about the dislocated, reassembled forms of closeness that define our present visual and emotional landscape.