Hynek Martinec’s AI experiment took eight days of drawing by hand

Hynek Martinec gave AI a place in the planning of APPLECORE, then spent eight days drawing the composition by hand. He described the process to Artlyst’s Paul Carey-Kent in September, after completing the work at Hypha Studios South Bank.[1]

The mural belonged to a two-part exhibition curated by Ben Tufnell, with paintings subsequently shown at Varvara Roza Galleries in St James’s. Its central motif was the apple, carrying associations with knowledge, temptation and technological change. The gallery programme ran into October.[2]

On his own website, Martinec records the wall drawing at 17 by 2.45 metres. The same catalogue lists the much smaller Applecore oil painting at 50 by 65 centimetres. The project’s ideas travelled between intimate objects and a work requiring an entire stretch of wall.[3]

The image passes through several decisions

Martinec told Carey-Kent that he researched for months, combined historical and contemporary images in Photoshop, and used AI for the first time to design some areas. He then transferred the plan onto a grey wall with black and white drawing materials. He described the public act of making it as a performance.[1]

A digital plan can contain a persuasive image while leaving plenty undecided about its physical form. Scale changes how separate details meet. A mark drawn at arm’s reach has to contribute to something seen from farther away. Choosing what to keep, how large to make it and how to connect it to the surrounding work remains part of making the picture.

That movement between images and materials predates this experiment. In Cyberlemon, shown at Prague’s DOX in 2025, Martinec used a lemon to connect still-life traditions with contemporary machinery. The title painting borrowed angular forms from Tesla’s Cybertruck. Elsewhere, parts of canvases remained unpainted, exposing charcoal underdrawing; a monumental wall work gave the figure of Atlas a giant lemon to carry.[4]

The fruit supplies continuity while the visual language changes around it. AI enters an established habit of recombining references, alongside the decisions about drawing, painting and scale that already give those references a particular form.

An apple core appears with a drone; an iPhone and camera share a still life with a Queen Elizabeth II figurine.[1]

The wall drawing was conceived as temporary. Martinec told Artlyst that he had designed it for destruction. Permanence was never the promised reward for the days spent making it.[1]

That decision gives the public making an additional purpose. Attention can fall on the time and choices involved in constructing an image, even when the physical image is intended to disappear. The digital plan and the performance become different parts of the work’s life.

For all its historical and technological references, the project also leaves room for a simpler encounter. In the gallery’s statement, Martinec says the apple can remain “a quiet, beautiful object beyond symbolism”. The small fruit gives viewers something to look at before they decide how much of the surrounding history to carry with them.[2]

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