« Fratres in Filio » is a digital artwork by Sfynks. No AI involved, but weeks of meticulous work with a raster graphic editor.

Drawing primarily on Mannerist and Baroque influences, the pictorial process was intended to yield a detailed, aestheticized, meaning-laden, and dramatic representation of the actual and possible interplays between Christianity and the war in Ukraine.

Accordingly, among other perceptual and symbolic elements, brutality, death, suffering, evil, sin, sacrifice, martyrdom, and expiation, were to be part of the picture.

After an initial draft, overly sanitized, overly transfigured, which certainly conveyed the bittersweet serenity of the so-called « Eternal Rest », the choice was made to include gory visuals somehow akin to those one finds in some currents of Christian art (dolorism, naturalism, expressionism): no gratuitous horror, but uncensored depictions aiming, on the one hand, for a fairly realistic, singularized rendering of war and its atrocities, and on the other hand, for a humanized, palpably incarnate, transposed version of the Crucifixion.