INTERVIEW
Giano Cesare
Toward the Unplaceable Face
Giano Cesare's portraits resist placement. In the series What Do You Think They Think When They Look at You?, figures arrive almost as known faces and stop just short of becoming them. Something holds, and something pulls back. The looking extends. The viewer stays inside the image without knowing why.
In this conversation with G—G Generative Generation, Cesare traces the logic behind that pull: the perceptual slippage his images are built to produce, the social reflexes they make visible, and the authorship that sits in deciding what a portrait is allowed to withhold.
Artist
GIANO CESARE
Lives
MILAN, ITALY
Interview
G—G EDITORS
Published
JANUARY 2026
The portraits sit in a condition closer
to becoming than to product.
I do not choose between those readings.
G—G
Your portraits sit across a wide range, from near-human faces with only a slight interference to figures that are clearly hybrid. How do you work across that range, and what are you calibrating for?
GIANO CESARE
The different registers are not variations on one idea. Each one opens the image to a different viewer.
When the hybrid form is overt, the viewer arrives quickly to a conclusion about what the portrait is. They pre-categorise, and the looking that follows happens inside that pre-categorisation. The portrait then has to do its work against a viewer who thinks they have already understood. When the interference is subtle, a displacement the viewer cannot quite name, the conclusion never arrives. The looking extends, and the viewer stays inside the image for longer without knowing why.
Neither of those is superior. They are two different doors into the same set of questions, and the same face, depending on which door the viewer came through, will be read differently. Animality is one of the materials I use to build those doors, not a subject I am depicting.
G—G
Your practice seems to gesture toward a social dimension. The shifts between subtle animal interference and explicit hybrid form might be read as commentary on how we decide what kind of being we are looking at. Does that interpretation resonate?
GIANO CESARE
It does, though I would not put it as commentary. Commentary suggests the image is about something outside itself. The portraits are not about a point external to them.
We live inside systems that sort and separate, often in ways that feel natural until we stop to question them. We romanticise animals in some contexts and use animal metaphors to justify exclusion in others. That contradiction is present in how we meet anyone unfamiliar. The portraits do not illustrate that, and they do not settle it. They carry it, and they let the viewer notice it in themselves.
G—G
Your figures appear to return the gaze, which creates a different dynamic from traditional portraiture. Could you speak to this exchange between subject and viewer?
GIANO CESARE
In most portraits the subject is offered up for interpretation and the viewer holds the power. I am interested in what happens when the portrait notices you back.
Some faces meet the viewer directly. Others close their eyes, turn in profile, or look away. Each of these is a decision, not a default. Closed eyes decline what was expected. A profile chooses the angle at which the meeting happens. Averted gaze keeps the viewer at a distance of its own choosing. The viewer arrives on terms the portrait has already set.
Artist
GIANO CESARE
Lives
MILAN, ITALY
Interview
G—G EDITORS
Published
JANUARY 2026
The tool interrupts me by proposing
a move I would not have chosen.
I interrupt the tool by rejecting
the first output, and the second,
and often the twentieth.
The piece lives in that back-and-forth.
The portraits sit in a condition closer
to becoming than to product.
I do not choose between those readings.
When you look at a face you cannot
place, you are in the same position
as someone looking at an encrypted string:
you sense there is a fact to know, and
you do not yet have what you need to read it.
G—G
There is a strong physicality to these portraits despite their digital construction. What draws you toward that sculptural quality?
GIANO CESARE
I think of pictures as having weight. Even on a screen, a portrait should occupy space.
The approach is closer to sculpture than to painting. Mass and structure come first, then the way light moves across a surface, then the sense that a face has been shaped by force and time. The base of each portrait is something I have drawn by hand, even if only as a rough structural pass that defines the core features. Generative tools enter after that, and the image then moves back and forth many times between manual work and the tool until the surface holds. What I accept from the tool is what arrives at something I had already formed in mind, or what proposes a move I had not anticipated but which belongs to the same intention. Everything else is rejected. Skin has density and history. I keep those traces visible, so the image reads as physically present even when the subject cannot be placed.
G—G
Generative tools have made hybrid and uncanny portraiture easy to produce, and much of what circulates is disposable, consumed at the speed of a scroll. Your work shares the surface vocabulary of that territory, but what you have just described (the hand-built base, the iterative refusal between tool and image) is not how most of that genre is made. The difference is not only conceptual, then, but also material. Where do you locate the work in relation to the broader category?
GIANO CESARE
The shared vocabulary is not incidental. The portraits are made inside that territory, deliberately, with full awareness of what it has come to look like. The difference you describe is the reason the proximity works.
The portraits are made to sustain a different kind of looking, and that looking is not available at the speed the genre usually asks for. The ground is neutral, the palette is restrained, the surface carries weight. These are not features the eye notices in two seconds. They are there for viewers who have slowed down, and they reward that slowing. Viewers who do not slow down will place the portraits inside the genre and keep moving. I understand the reflex. I have no interest in converting them.
The practice accepts the conditions it works inside, including the speed at which most images are received now. Locating the work means accepting that most viewers will not see it, and continuing anyway.
G—G
You have said the generative tool interrupts your process rather than producing it. What does that interruption look like inside a single piece?
GIANO CESARE
I ask the tool to do things I would not do. Deform a feature. Push an animal trait into a region of the face I had drawn as human. Thicken a surface beyond what I was ready to accept. Misread a gesture. Then I reject most of what comes back and take the small part that is useful into manual work, where I correct, repaint, and layer.
The tool interrupts me by proposing a move I would not have chosen. I interrupt the tool by rejecting the first output, and the second, and often the twentieth. The piece lives in that back-and-forth. If I accept everything the system offers, the image collapses into the generic. If I refuse everything, I lose the strangeness the tool can introduce. Neither side is allowed to finish the sentence.
The tool interrupts me by proposing
a move I would not have chosen.
I interrupt the tool by rejecting
the first output, and the second,
and often the twentieth.
The piece lives in that back-and-forth.
When you look at a face you cannot
place, you are in the same position
as someone looking at an encrypted string:
you sense there is a fact to know, and
you do not yet have what you need to read it.
G—G
Across this conversation you have described the tool as an interrupter and described imperfection as a way of restoring decision. How do you understand authorship in a practice where part of the image is proposed by a system you did not build?
GIANO CESARE
Authorship has moved from the act of producing every mark to the act of deciding what stays. That is a real shift and I do not want to minimise it. I would also not describe it as unprecedented. A photographer does not build the light. A sculptor does not grow the marble. A painter working from a model does not invent the body in front of them. Authorship has always involved negotiation with something the artist did not originate. What has changed is the speed at which the counterpart now proposes, and the scale of what it can propose.
My authorship sits in the sequence of decisions: what I reject, what I correct, what I layer over, what I keep rough, what I leave open. The materials entering a piece are various: drawings, photographic fragments, studies made for the specific portrait, outputs from the tool. None of them is the image. Each is something to be absorbed, displaced, or rejected by the next step. The generative output is one material among others. It becomes part of a piece only once I have decided it should, and only in the form I have decided it should take.
G—G
The dominant aesthetic of generative imagery pushes toward maximum perfection. You move in the other direction. Is imperfection becoming a critical position, not only a stylistic one?
GIANO CESARE
It is, increasingly. The current default of generative imagery is total perfection. Every surface is fully defined. Every face arrives already complete. An image of that kind closes on itself. It produces the appearance of the real but feels uninhabited.
The technology moves quickly. What counted as the default a year ago is already shifting. Tools now produce more unusual constructions, more hesitation, more apparent strangeness in the face itself. But the emptiness has not gone away. It has been covered: colour grading, editorial lighting, simulated film grain, a tasteful wrongness borrowed from surrealism or glitch. Stylistic layers arrive on top of the image to make the absence of inhabitation look like an aesthetic choice. The image still feels unlived, but now it is dressed.
Working against that default is a position, and it does not become less of a position as the default changes. A hesitating line, a slight asymmetry, a surface that has not been smoothed, a decision that has cost the artist something. These slow the viewer down and ask the viewer to stay. They also mark authorship. A flaw left intentionally is a decision, and decisions separate a piece of work from an output. Most images are now tuned for instant consumption. I am working elsewhere.
G—G
The portraits lack conventional identifiers, not only in their titles, which use alphanumeric codes like Subject-A3G4T2, but also in their presentation as unclothed figures against neutral backgrounds. What motivates these strategies?
GIANO CESARE
Most portraiture depends on naming and placement. A name, a garment, a setting. These anchor the subject and give the viewer a starting point. I want the shortcuts removed.
Clothing is one of the fastest ways identity is read. It carries culture, class, sometimes intent. Strip it away and the narratives that come with it go with it. The neutral ground performs the same function for time and place. The titles extend the same logic. The codes are not decorative; they have an internal structure a patient viewer could eventually read. What matters to me is what the structure performs at the level of encounter. A face you cannot resolve puts you in the same position as someone looking at an encrypted string: you sense there is a fact to know, and you do not yet have what you need to read it. The title repeats, at the level of language, what the portrait does at the level of the image.
face that cannot be placed is not failing
to be placed. It has declined the question,
or it has asked a different one,
and whichever it is doing, it is doing
without asking permission.
G—G
Some might argue that ambiguity, when it is not tied to specific cultural material, risks becoming decorative: formally interesting but lacking the friction that comes from contact with real cultural tensions. How do you see the relation between ambiguity and social engagement in this work?
GIANO CESARE
The objection assumes that engagement enters an image through its references. A portrait that names a history, a geography, a cultural position is understood to have done the work of engagement, and one that does not is understood to have declined it. I don't share the assumption.
What the portraits put in front of the viewer is the moment before a category is assigned. The pause this produces makes the viewer's own reflex visible to them: the speed at which they were about to decide gender, origin, species, worth. The engagement is there, in the viewer's own looking, not in a subject pointed to from outside the frame. Sexuality, migration, race, neurodivergence are present in this practice, but they are present the way they are present in a street encounter with a stranger: as the conditions under which looking is already happening, before anyone has announced anything.
Ambiguity is read as decoration by viewers for whom the looking itself is not of interest. That reading is available to anyone who wants it.
G—G
Your approach engages with classical portraiture but also destabilises it. Do you see yourself as extending that tradition or breaking away from it?
GIANO CESARE
Classical portraiture fixed its sitters. It told you who they were, what they were worth, and how to rank them against others. The portrait did the assigning, and the viewer received the assignment. I am not interested in the arguments for or against that tradition, but I notice that the operation has not gone away. It has migrated. The sorting now happens in the viewer, in the first second of looking, before the portrait has had a chance to do anything. The work I am making is addressed to that second.
G—G
Have viewers ever interpreted your portraits in ways that surprised you, or that altered your own understanding of the work?
GIANO CESARE
Once the pieces are out they no longer belong only to me.
The response that has stayed with me most is from a viewer who was certain they knew one of the faces, even though they knew they had never seen it. They could not place it and could not let go of it. That is the condition I care about most in the work: when an image feels intimate and inaccessible at once.
G—G
If one of your portraits could speak, what do you think it would say?
GIANO CESARE
It would not explain itself. Explanation is what the viewer is looking for, and the portrait is not there to provide it. If it spoke, it might ask: What do you think I am thinking about you? Whatever came to mind in answer would describe the person looking more than it would describe the portrait. ◾️
face that cannot be placed is not failing
to be placed. It has declined the question,
or it has asked a different one,
and whichever it is doing, it is doing
without asking permission.
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