Anna Condo Blends Photography, Painting, and AI in 'À la carte' Series

Anna Condo, an Armenian-origin artist, creates the series 'À la carte' using AI, digital collage, and painting to produce hyper-realistic food images that trigger desire yet remain artificial. The work draws from still-life traditions (Chardin, Manet), cinema (Visconti, Buster Keaton), and childhood memories of French and Armenian cuisine. Condo combines multiple AI generators to maintain aesthetic control, deliberately introducing imperfection to counter AI's cleanliness. She describes the process as 'suspending time' in an infinite present, merging painting and photography without choosing between them. The series questions photography's role in an era of simulation, arguing that photography has always been capable of simulation and that instability is its strength. Condo's practice emphasizes the tension between attraction and frustration, with the image itself deciding when it is finished. The interview was published on Collater.al.