Portraits as status symbols disappeared from our social radar screen over half a century ago, replaced by Selfies and the implied threat that Everyday is Casual and nothing lasts. Lucky for us, Adam Bustamante didn’t get the memo.

Adam’s work is a kind of a series of portraits in that he focuses our attention on the human face, that window to our souls that has always been a source of comfort, the way we recognize each other in an embarrassingly intimate way. Except Adam’s portraits don’t follow the rules we understand. Sure, he captures our ideals of beauty, the long, elegant necks, the shape of a perfect ear. And like Rembrandt, he paints so realistically there is no confusion. He’s talking about us.

But that’s where things get tricky. Because, unlike the traditional use of portraiture, he’s not immortalizing any specific CEO or College President. He’s using the genre to ask questions about all of us, right here, right now as we navigate our way through an Artificial Intelligence that comes pre-packaged out of a machine, infinitely reproduced and, unlike real people, immortal. His gorgeous women don’t meet our gaze. They look away as though there’s something they don’t want us to see. And they’re branded by the logo-like patterns that mark us as consumers of something we don’t quite understand. Skin surfaces dissolve into pixels. Heads break into fractals, the same image from slightly different perspectives, one flowing out of the other, all possibilities existing at once. Colors that radiate. Color that shocks.

These portraits are certainly not intended to lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. Perhaps these are glimpses into an ancient past or possibly a not so distant future. Nevertheless, Adam Bustamante has painted us.