Apollon est Nadir Nadir est Apollon * 2020

Apollon est Nadir, Nadir est Apollon (Apollo is Nadir, Nadir is Apollo) is a generative multimedia work created by António Baía Reis and Francisco Modesto as an artistic response developed within the wider frame of Nadir Afonso’s centenary commemorations. Conceived as a hybrid of generative moving-image art, experimental music, and poetic/theatrical expression, the piece re-enters the universe of Portuguese modernist painter Nadir Afonso (1920–2013) through his painting Apolo (2007), listed by the Fundação Nadir Afonso within the artist’s Geometric Realism period.

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The project was also aligned with the centenary ecosystem that, throughout 2020, activated Afonso’s legacy through exhibitions and institutional initiatives, including a specific framework that encouraged multimedia works derived from a Nadir Afonso artwork, promoted through a collaboration between the Fundação Nadir Afonso and the University of Porto.

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Developed in the pre-ChatGPT era, the work already signals Reis’s early fascination with emergent generative tools, an intuitive seduction by what algorithmic image systems could do to a canonical artwork before “generative AI” became mainstream language. The visual component was co-created by Reis and Modesto through an experimental pipeline combining generative art and digital collage with AI-assisted image transformation tools (e.g. Artbreeder) and techniques such as pixel sorting and morphing. Rather than animating Apolo in a literal sense, the process decomposes the painting into an evolving visual grammar, fragmenting and recombining forms, shifting texture and colour into new rhythmic relationships, and rebuilding the work as a hypnotic, dreamlike continuum.

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Conceptually, the piece is driven by a symbolic pairing: Apollo as harmony, balance, metaphysics, solar clarity, an emblem of prophetic and artistic inspiration; Nadir as the pure expression of a mathematical artistic essence, a precision that stems from intuition and manifests through painting. The work stages this duality as sensorial dramaturgy, order continuously unsettled by transformation, perfection continuously threatened by drift, allowing the viewer to experience Afonso’s “exactitude” as something alive, unstable, and affective rather than purely formal.

 

Within this architecture, António Baía Reis served as Creative Director and performer, and also composed the central musical work: an original piano composition shaped by a Futurist sensibility, where propulsion, rupture, and intensity take precedence over lyrical resolution. The score is built on unexpected cadences, abrupt turns, and volatile transitions, treating the piano as both engine and fracture line, so that musical time behaves like the visuals: not linear narrative, but a field of accelerations, collisions, and suspended states. Sound does not “underscore” the image; it argues with it, pressing the Apollonian promise of harmony into a more contemporary register where precision is haunted by instability.

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The result is a mesmerizing generative audiovisual rite: a contemporary act of homage that does not preserve Apolo behind glass, but reactivates it as a living score, crossing myth and mathematics, modernist rigor and algorithmic transformation, and proposing a new way of encountering Afonso’s legacy through immersive, research-driven multimedia practice.