Whether it is the camera obscura, photography, or an electron microscope, the tools we use to see determine what we see; the medium shapes the message before the image exists. The procedural source environment shown here is used in the development of the Paralectic Realism paintings, functioning as the structural lens through which the work is generated.
A distinct post-digital extension is emerging, one that builds on the trajectories opened by Richter, Polke and Tuymans while shifting their concerns into the domain of simulation systems. Where Richter treated the photograph as a regulating device, and Polke exposed the instability of the image through chemical volatility, this approach begins inside procedural environments rather than captured reality.
Images arise from simulation systems that move, reconfigure, and generate their own internal reactions. The resulting paintings function not as representations but as residues: physical translations of forces enacted within a Unity-like engine, where bodies fragment, space buckles, and structure mutates under algorithmic pressure.
In this context, the cool optical distance associated with Tuymans and the corrosive instability associated with Polke are both reconfigured. The image is no longer a memory, an event, or an observation; it is the discarded by-product of an ongoing system. What appears on the canvas is a fossilised record of procedural processes rather than aesthetic interpretation.
This marks the emergence of a post-simulation realism in which painting operates as the material residue of system-driven behaviour, not as the representation of an external world.