Jon Gesalaga is a Basque-Spanish contemporary artist working at the intersection of the human body, AI-generated imagery, and a personal history that goes back over two decades. His current project, De Anatomia II, is still in progress, and deliberately so.

The project has a history. Around 2000, Gesalaga made the original De Anatomia as his final project in graphic design school, photographing bodies in his living room with a borrowed three-megapixel camera and combining the images in Photoshop with photocopied historical anatomical plates from the San Sebastián library, part photography, part graphic design. He even built the work into an animated digital gallery, complete with music and transitions, which was well received at the time. That series was eventually lost. Twenty-six years later, he’s picked the inquiry back up, not to recreate it, but to continue it.

In between, Gesalaga became a therapist specializing in addiction, a practice he doesn’t separate from his art. The same inquiry into the human condition that shaped his creative work also shapes how he sits with people through their darkest experiences, and he sees the two as continually informing one another.

What follows is his account of returning to that inquiry, in his own words.
 

On disappearance and return

The first “De Anatomia” series no longer exists. Why? Can you tell us more?

The first De Anatomia series disappeared many years ago. My family was always fairly nomadic and, after many moves and changes of circumstance, the work was eventually lost. There may still be a copy somewhere, but I have never felt any real need to look for it.

I would have liked to preserve it, of course: it is part of my history. But what mattered was not contained only in those images. I was just over twenty when I made them, and I could barely name the impulse that had given rise to them. Today I can recognize it and articulate it more clearly, although its underlying direction has not changed.

That is why I never wanted to reconstruct it. De Anatomia II does not repeat the first series’ solutions; it comes from the same place. The work was lost. The inquiry was not.

Did working without any material trace of your own past free you in the creative act?

Yes, although I only became fully aware of that freedom when I read the question. I was not working from a void: I remember some images and, above all, an atmosphere that was cold and warm at once, clinical yet human. What I did not have before me were its specific solutions, and that kept them from becoming a model I had to obey.

Its influence never disappeared. The territory it opened and something of its graphic tone can be traced, in very different ways, through my later work and essays. De Anatomia II condenses an inquiry that kept changing and makes its connection to that beginning explicit.

Anatomy already brings with it a visual vocabulary: graphic structures, classifications, ways of making the body legible. I wanted to rearrange that vocabulary and discover what it could mean now. During the process, the new series has gradually freed itself both from De Anatomia and from the rules it was beginning to impose on itself.

Do you think that absence helped the work renew itself?

Probably, yes, although I cannot know what would have happened had I kept the series. Perhaps it would have conditioned me more; perhaps it would have pushed me to move even further away from it. That alternative process does not exist.

The absence created room, but the renewal comes above all from twenty-six years of life, thought, work, and artistic development. The tools have also changed, especially with synthetic imagery, although no technology ever explains a work by itself.

De Anatomia II broadens the territory: it introduces greater visual complexity, more relationships between bodies, graphic structures, and ideas, and a broader understanding of what it means to be human. But it does not negate the first series; it contains it. That earlier work was younger, simpler, and more intuitive. This one adds questions that did not yet exist for me then.

I could imitate some of that naivety now, but it would be false. I hope there will one day be a De Anatomia VII that forces me to look at this second part as I now look at the first.

Did the subject haunt you for those twenty-six years, or did it resurface after a natural maturation?

I would not say it haunted me. It accompanied me, with varying degrees of conscious presence.

I thought about returning to it at times, but never as an obsession or a debt. There were long periods when De Anatomia did not cross my mind at all. What remained was the inquiry already behind it: the attempt to understand that mysterious object that is the human being, that is myself, and, by extension, the reality we experience.

Over those years, that search moved through experience, reading, thought, writing, my work as a therapist, and also the fairly basic effort of sorting out my own head and getting through certain stages of life. There were almost ten years without visual work, but creativity was not dead; it was operating elsewhere.

The possibility of returning appeared several times as a flash, immediately followed by the same answer: not yet. This time was different. Before making a single image, I knew it would be called De Anatomia II. My return to visual creation, greater technical and personal maturity, and synthetic imagery as a territory capable of opening new possibilities all converged. It was not a calculated decision. The feeling was very simple: this time, yes.

There is also a dialogue with the young man who made the first series. Not out of nostalgia, and not to let him direct the present, but to recognize him as one of the layers I am still made of.

On transparency and technologies of the body

You place synthetic imagery in a lineage that runs from anatomical engraving to MRI… Do you see it as a series of radical breaks, or as the logical, almost inevitable continuation of that history?

I see breaks in the methods and continuity in the impulse. Anatomical engraving, X-rays, MRI, and synthetic imagery do not form a single technical chain. Some belong to the scientific history of observation; others to the history of representation. They intersect, exchange languages, and transform one another.

The continuity lies deeper. We are conscious animals that need to ask what we are, what reality we inhabit, and how we relate to it. Science, art, philosophy, and religion are different articulations of that same impulse. The breaks appear in the methods and possibilities of each period; the continuity, in the need that gives rise to them.

To understand, we need to separate, classify, and name. The risk begins when we mistake those useful divisions for the ultimate structure of reality. Anatomical engraving already showed that the boundaries were never clean: it was an instrument of knowledge and, at the same time, a visual construction shaped by drawing, composition, and the aesthetic codes of its time.

The human body also introduces a direct self-reference. I could have worked through botany, zoology, or geology, but when we represent the body we inevitably speak about ourselves. It is the place from which we experience reality and, at the same time, part of that reality.

Synthetic imagery introduces a specific break: it no longer needs a real body as its immediate referent, and it vastly expands the artist’s material freedom. Artificial intelligence, in the form it has taken today, was not a predetermined outcome. Yet it also resonates with an ancient human aspiration that reappears in different periods and cultural traditions: the desire to create something in our own image, capable of reproducing or extending faculties once regarded as exclusively human. In the field of image-making, that same impulse has produced tools capable of materializing images that previously remained in the imagination or depended on far more restrictive means. What is deeply human, then, is not this particular technology, but the impulse behind it.

You say each technology does not reveal a deeper truth, but constructs its own version of the visible body. What does AI-generated art make visible that science cannot?

Some scientific technologies have indeed revealed previously inaccessible layers of reality and genuinely expanded our knowledge. What no technology or discipline can do on its own is contain what we call truth.

More than the tool itself, the answer lies in what the artist does with it. Artificial intelligence expands the field of possibility; selection, relation, and the construction of meaning remain human operations.

Science and art do not compete because they operate under different contracts. Science needs to delimit, measure, verify, and produce testable claims. That restriction is precisely what allows it to be science. Art works under another contract: it does not have to prove a thesis; it can create the conditions for a question to be experienced. It can bring together what analysis needs to separate and hold simultaneous contradictions.

That does not grant art access to some higher realm. Science shows aspects of reality that an image could not reach through intuition. Art can work with dimensions that the scientific method needs to leave out in order to function. They do not replace one another; they widen the view from different positions.

A body that never existed can speak about what it means to be human because even the representation of a real model selects, frames, and transforms. Fiction is not opposed to reality here; it allows us to relate to reality without being required to document a specific individual.

Art does not create meaning from nothing either. It is more like recognizing a constellation: the elements were already there, but a gaze draws a connection between them and makes it perceptible.

On the post-anatomical sacred

You speak of a “sacredness that comes after knowledge”; no supernatural, no religious return. How do you keep an image sacred without ever letting it become mystical or decorative?

There is a problem of language. Words such as sacred or mystical arrive loaded with religious and supernatural associations that I do not always want to invoke. I use sacred, cautiously, to point to what is set apart from ordinary use, and mystical in relation to mystery, to what cannot be fully formulated. I am speaking about an entirely natural reality that exceeds the current limits of our consciousness and our representations.

I sometimes think words are hands pointing. The problem begins when we confuse the hand with what it points toward.

A sacredness that comes after knowledge does not mean returning to a stage before reason. Rational thought should go as far as it can: it gives us firmer ground and protects us from superstition and autosuggestion. But its language does not contain the whole of experience either. At a certain point, it may be necessary to set it provisionally aside, not deny it.

There is no single image in De Anatomia II in which that sacredness appears all at once and in full. If one image could hold everything, I would not need a series. The experience is built through accumulation, contrasts, and the movement through the series.

To prevent the sacred from becoming decorative solemnity, intention is not enough. First I observe what the image does to me; then come composition, coherence with the inquiry, distance, and the response of other people. Intuition opens a possibility, and analysis examines, sharpens, or dismantles it.

Reception will never be uniform. Some people will feel something they cannot formulate; others will understand the discourse without being affected by it; and in the response closest to my intention, both will happen at once. I have no formula. If I knew how to transmit the sacred infallibly, I could found the most effective religion in history. I am not speaking from a pulpit: I am trying to point toward something I can barely name myself.

You locate that sacredness in the body only after it has been opened, studied, reduced to information. Is there not a risk that this discourse simply aestheticizes what science has already made cold?

You are pointing to a real risk: that the discourse might end up aestheticizing what science is thought to have made cold. But for me that sacredness does not arrive after dissection; it is there before, during, and after. Opening, dissecting, and reducing belong to a form of knowledge; what appears with them is not a new sacredness, but a new human way of relating to the body.

Nor am I looking for something sacred hidden inside matter, as though opening the body might reveal a separate soul. Matter does not contain the sacred as something other than itself: it is one of its forms.

Science needs to turn the body provisionally into an object, to separate, measure, and classify. That reduction is legitimate and necessary; a single piece of data can save a life. It only becomes dehumanizing when we forget it is a reduction and mistake it for the whole. Flesh, bone, and numbers are no less human than an emotion.

De Anatomia II tries to keep those lines active without allowing one to cancel the other. Their relation gives rise to a third image: neither pure anatomical analysis nor sacredness detached from matter. A human presence becomes perceptible in faces, expressions, vulnerability, the relation between bodies, composition, and the movement through the series. A study figure acquires a presence; a biography appears. And then something harder to locate remains, something I cannot fully explain myself.

Here it matters to me to distinguish aesthetics from beautification. Every work organizes a sensory experience; making something pleasant or neutralizing its conflict is another matter. In this series, beauty allows us to remain before what might initially drive us away. Repulsion at exposed flesh is not an objective property of the flesh: it is shaped by survival mechanisms, species memory, culture, and individual experience. I am not trying to beautify horror, but to question the idea that horror is the only possible reading.

The risk that someone might reduce the images to visual luxury or sophisticated medical imagery exists. I cannot fully control the viewer, but I can control construction and selection. I discarded hundreds of images that worked visually but held no tension. The title, sequence, and discourse are also part of the work, even though an isolated image retains a power of its own.

Nor do I see anything ethically problematic in perceiving beauty in flesh. The problem would arise if there were real harm, lack of consent, degradation, or a glorification of violence.

On confrontation

You describe the graphic structures as “beautiful prisons”, systems that make the body legible while fixing it in place. How far are you willing to go to keep an image disturbing rather than simply aesthetic?

I am willing to sacrifice immediacy, attractiveness, or even marketability if that is what it takes to preserve an image’s tension. What I would not do is sacrifice beauty to prove that I am serious. I do not need to choose between beauty and disturbance: in De Anatomia II they coexist.

Something can be disturbing without being aggressive or unpleasant. It can appear in a strange beauty, in a serenity that shifts our categories, or in the calm with which one image alters the way we read the others. The series needs to breathe. If every image screamed in the same way, they would end up cancelling one another out.

When I speak of “beautiful prisons”, I do not mean the body as the prison of a spirit. I mean the graphic structures and, through them, the conceptual structures with which we understand reality. A word, a line, or a classification allows us to distinguish and explain, but it also narrows and fixes something that is always larger than its representation. I am not denouncing the concept; I am acknowledging its double nature.

During the process, I have also encountered tools that block depictions of blood, wounds, or anatomy under a protective logic that does not always distinguish violence from artistic inquiry. Perhaps the series is also, although it did not begin with that intention, a response to this technological and cultural sanitization of the body.

That relationship changes throughout the series. In some images, the structure imprisons the body completely; in others, it becomes embedded in the flesh until it forms part of a false identity; in others, it begins to dissipate, or the body relates to it less rigidly. The graphic structures are not decoration: they shape the movement through the series.

During selection, I discarded hundreds of attractive images that had lost their tension. Even so, I do not follow some puritanical rule that says every image that merely seduces must disappear. It may contribute to the rhythm or introduce an irregularity that interests me. I would remove it if it destroyed the overall meaning, not to obey a dogma.

There is also the opposite risk: turning disturbance into spectacle. But I am not going to tone down an anatomical series. Showing hearts, opened chests, or exposed brains is not adding horror; horror is one possible reading. I want to free that matter from the obligation to appear only as horror and allow it to appear as beautiful, true, intimate, or even tender.

Some representations of the body can be deliberately raw. Are you aiming for discomfort in the viewer? Is that discomfort, for you, the only proof that the image has touched something true?

Yes, I do seek a certain discomfort, and I am almost certain it will arise, but I do not want it to come only from exposed flesh or to act alone. I want the first reaction of rejection to coexist with the beauty of the composition, the light, the stillness, the intimacy, or the relation between bodies.

The discomfort arises when the framework through which the viewer was interpreting the image begins to feel too small. If the image no longer fits within the category of pure horror, it is the viewer’s own perceptual structure that comes under pressure.

But discomfort is not the only proof that the image has touched something true. It may also do so through beauty, serenity, recognition, fascination, or something that exceeds what can immediately be put into words. What interests me is that those responses, even contradictory ones, coexist.

On work in progress and ahead

The project is still open, the number of works, video, book, all of it left undecided. Is that a deliberate stance against an audience that always demands finished work, or a necessity imposed by the nature of the project itself?

There is something of both, although I would distinguish between bringing De Anatomia II to a close and closing off the inquiry. This second part will end. I do not yet know how many images it will contain or what its final structure will be, but I will recognize the point of closure through a combination of the form it has reached, coherence, intuition, and exhaustion. Ending a stage does not mean exhausting what gave rise to it.

That is why I did not want to set a number of works in advance or force the project to obey a form decided before it existed. Video, a book, or other formats are possible extensions, not requirements for declaring this stage complete. They may belong to this part or to another in the future. A specific work needs to stop, even if the inquiry continues.

Presenting the project before completing it was deliberate. I had always made a series public after closing it, and this time I wanted to try another relationship with the outside world: to show the work in gestation, open the process up, and let the world act on it, even though I remain the final arbiter. This interview is already acting on the work, although I do not yet know exactly how.

I understand that a magazine, the market, or the public needs clearly delimited projects. But there is also a rebellion against contemporary speed and the obligation to produce at the pace set by algorithms. I want to reclaim my time without turning resistance into another form of obedience. I am not going to post once a month to prove that I am against the algorithm. I will post when I need to or, ultimately, for the most powerful reason in the universe: because I damn well feel like it. I may go two months without posting and then, if I need to, post twice a day.

The complete work, if by complete we mean the definitive exhaustion of the question, will never exist. What does need to exist is a form precise enough to close this stage.

If De Anatomia II failed to hold precision and ambiguity together, knowledge and mystery together, what would that failure actually look like?

It would take the form of a disproportion. If precision became too dominant, the result could be an impeccable but closed system, with no room for anything to exceed its structure. If mystery dominated, it could dissolve into vagueness, solemnity, or the appearance of depth without enough grounding in matter. Beauty might also fill the whole room, leaving no space for whatever it was meant to let in.

I doubt one dimension would cancel the other completely. I am convinced that De Anatomia II represents an advance on the first series and, at the same time, that it contains limits, deviations, and imbalances. To achieve a perfect articulation, I would have to live much longer, learn much more, accumulate other experiences, and perhaps work with technologies that do not yet exist. That perfection is not my aim.

That imbalance would also be information. It would force me to ask why my gaze leaned in that particular direction and what that says about the moment in which I made the work. Sometimes a work knows something about its maker before its maker can put it into words.

De Anatomia II can be a success in relation to the first and a provisional failure in relation to a future work that goes further. That distance is the space in which artistic evolution takes place. The real failure would have been not to make it for fear of falling short of an impossible perfection, or to postpone it indefinitely until I felt ready for something for which a single lifetime would probably never be enough.

Jon’s website jongesalaga.com
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All images © Jon Gesalaga 2026