Reality Collides with Desire: The Painterly Conflict of Facetune Portraits

Each work in Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits is a confrontation between truth and technology. What begins as a simple portrait becomes an uneasy hybrid — part human, part machine.

When AI tries to perfect the human image, the result isn’t harmony — it’s conflict. Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits captures the exact moment when reality collides with desire.

In these pieces, AI “enhancement” tools are pushed until they reveal their biases. The software stretches skin, narrows features, brightens tones — all in the name of beauty. But when those edits meet Andrew’s painterly interventions, the result is electric.

Every brushstroke becomes a site of resistance.

Every contradiction — between the digital and the tactile, the real and the ideal — is recorded like a scar.

Facetune Portraits doesn’t try to hide the mess. Instead, it exposes the uncomfortable truth: that beauty, once mediated by AI, becomes a reflection of data more than of self.

Andrew transforms that distortion into something poetic — a visual argument for authenticity in an age of algorithmic perfection.