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In contemporary culture, superheroes often serve as modern mythology, replacing the singular deities of monotheistic religion. Comic books and their protagonists wrestle with power, morality, and the contradictions of the human condition. These figures, draped in capes and masks, transcend mere entertainment, embodying both our deepest aspirations and our darkest anxieties. Their stories offer an illusion of moral clarity—where good and evil are neatly divided—yet, much like the real world, these binaries rarely hold. Superhero narratives, with their rigid ethical structures, obscure the complexity of human nature. The work of painters like Philip Guston, particularly his unflinching depictions of hooded Klan figures, interrogates this same tension—forcing us to confront the unsettling coexistence of villainy within the everyday.

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Much like these figures of fiction, immigrant communities navigate worlds that often render them both heroes and villains. They build, they struggle, they endure—shaping the cultural and economic landscapes around them while simultaneously being cast as threats or outsiders. In Johannesburg, the Lusophonic community, largely shaped by waves of Portuguese migration following the Carnation Revolution, has long existed within these contradictions. Their lives unfold in the quiet corners of the city—behind the counters of small cafés and corner stores, within homes filled with echoes of forgotten dialects.

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This body of work, titled after Stephen Gray’s poem Apollo Café, honors these complex figures—people both revered and resented, ordinary yet monumental. The poem captures the rhythm of 1980s South Africa, where immigrant-run corner stores became lifelines for entire communities. These shops, first opened by those who arrived with nothing but their histories and resilience, became more than places of commerce; they became spaces of belonging, survival, and reinvention.

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Through oil portraiture, neon signage, and a collection of written and AI-generated narratives—drawn from the memory of Johannesburg’s Lusophonic community—each individual in this body of work speaks their own story. Their voices, filtered through the imperfect recollections of machine learning, form an archive of longing and loss, resilience and reinvention. The neon tributes illuminate their identities, flickering like altars to the past, echoing both the neon glow of roadside diners and the halos of sacred figures in classical art.

 

These individuals are neither saints nor villains, but something far more real—complicated, contradictory, human. Much like the figures in Guston’s paintings, their presence refuses simplification, unsettling our desire for moral binaries. As a child, superheroes shaped my imagination with their extraordinary feats; as an adult, I recognize the weight of sacrifice carried by those who came before me. If I can do anything, it is to offer them time—to pull them from behind their tills, away from their daily burdens, and grant them the royal treatment they have always deserved.

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Adilson De Oliveira’s practice unfolds in layers—mechanical, digital, and painterly—each medium collapsing into the next. The process begins with artificial intelligence, a paradoxical tool in the pursuit of memory. He employs software such as MidJourney and DALL·E to summon specters from the past: figures from the Lusophone enclaves of Johannesburg, their faces half-remembered, now estranged by the slow erosion of time and the geographies that shape forgetting. These reconstructions—imprecise yet eerily familiar—carry the distortions inherent in both memory and machine.

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Yet, De Oliveira is not satisfied with these images as final forms. There is something impersonal, too frictionless about their existence as digital apparitions. He prints them in the very neighborhood of his childhood, a gesture that is both significant and integral. Rather than using a traditional print studio, he chooses a place that produces car wraps, corner store advertisements, and signage for small businesses. This choice is deliberate, grounding his work in the visual language of his upbringing, and embedding these fleeting, AI-generated faces into the very production spaces that shape Johannesburg’s working-class districts.

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It is here that the labor begins in earnest. With oil paint, De Oliveira reclaims these machine-generated phantoms, imbuing them with the weight of the hand. This stage is meticulous, the application of paint dense, almost sculptural. The surface thickens, acquires resistance. What was once an ephemeral, digital creation becomes something tactile—something that collectors, suspicious of the digital, can touch and own. The irony is not lost on him.

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The tension between the mechanical and the handmade, between the instantaneous nature of AI and the slow insistence of oil, is a central theme in De Oliveira’s career. As a print studio technician, he worked the presses for monotypes and screen prints, often for artists whose names outshone his own. In those moments, he learned what he understands now: that the art market remains deeply entrenched in the fetishization of tradition. The discomfort surrounding AI-generated imagery, the refusal to acknowledge it as “authentic,” is merely another chapter in the ongoing history of artistic hierarchies.

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In his series Apollo Café, De Oliveira expands on these concerns, turning them into both intimate and declarative statements. The figures he paints—shopkeepers, factory workers, the quiet architects of Johannesburg’s informal economies—emerge not as symbols, but as presences. They are rendered with a force that denies nostalgia yet acknowledges loss. The neon signage that accompanies these portraits—its glow both devotional and commercial—draws from the visual language of working-class Johannesburg, its corner stores and cafés, where the flickering promises of belonging and transaction live. If there is reverence here, it is earned through lived experience, not sentimentality.

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De Oliveira’s practice becomes an act of subversion, a conceptual sleight-of-hand. The collectors who recoil at AI-generated images readily embrace his paintings, unaware—or perhaps willfully ignorant—that the “hand” they so cherish arrived second, not first. It is, in essence, a “no-change” Chappies scam—a knowing play on the art world’s insistence on medium as meaning. In this familiar Johannesburg scam, a shopkeeper gives a child a Chappies gum instead of proper change, assuming the child will accept it without protest. De Oliveira mirrors this bait-and-switch, presenting collectors with the comforting illusion of tradition, while secretly integrating the very technology they disdain.

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The hypocrisy of this discomfort is glaring. Critics who decry AI’s ability to scrape existing works from the internet turn a blind eye when renowned artists employ technicians and assistants to execute their visions, often without acknowledgment. The art world has long relied on invisible labor—painters with ateliers, sculptors with fabricators, photographers with retouchers. Yet when a machine performs a similar role, the reaction is one of outrage. De Oliveira exposes this contradiction, revealing how value in art is not determined by creation itself, but by the illusion of authenticity. In his work, the act of painting becomes both affirmation and ruse—a survival strategy within an industry that demands its ghosts be tangible, its illusions varnished.

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This text, too, is complicit in the game. Written by both AI and Adilson himself, it is a collaboration between human intent and machine logic, blurring the line between authorship and automation. This piece, prompted to write in the style of David Sylvester, reflects not just an imitation but an invocation of an art world voice. A.I., once again, serves as a tool for resurrecting memories of someone passed, framing reverence in a new context. In this moment, the blending of human intent and machine logic mirrors the very process De Oliveira engages in, with A.I. reviving the ghosts of history, while constructing new meaning in the present.

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The last line, “resurrecting memories, framing reverence,” is borrowed from the work of Tracey Rose, her words lending a particular resonance to the way in which De Oliveira’s paintings engage with the past. His work is somewhat reminiscent of the reading of names in a Catholic mass, those fallen or dead, their memories preserved and invoked in a ritual of remembrance. The act of painting here, too, becomes a form of tribute, each brushstroke a living memory of those who are no longer present.

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"Which stays a people town and loves the lame and the halt
In which I live save my soul
There is always a special Apollo Café."