Leonel Moura: Painting with robots

Leonel Moura is a Portuguese artist who creates generative art using robots. He places his work in the field of painting, but questions the artist’s own role in the work. He envisions a “Symbiotic art” where man and machine work together to abandon the domination of the art field by arbitrary human perceptions. The text "Swarm Paintings - Non-human art" outlines his interests in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics as artistic tools.

All this theory about the negation of the artist-as-genius is well-founded both in artificial intelligence theory and art history, but what is interesting is how the artist translates his ideas to actual work. Moura’s robot-executed paintings are very expressive, even organic in their appearance, without any aspect of a machinic aesthetic. The pieces are possessed of a distinctive movement and quality of line, as well as a dynamic use of color.

The mbots themselves look more like pragmatic solutions than high science, elegant in their lo-fi simplicity. It must be a pleasant experience to watch them paint.