Max-Daniel - Saint François et les oiseaux

Max-Daniel — Saint Francis and the Birds — DALL·E and oil painting — Unique 1/1 Work — 2026

Description

This work combines an initial creation made with DALL·E, a digital composition, and an original oil and medium-based painting intervention. The fire and smoke in the grove were manually painted directly onto the canvas after its printing.

Artificial intelligence is used here as a tool integrated into a broader artistic process. The finished work constitutes a unique 1/1 exemplar, signed and dated 2026 by the artist.

The artist

Max-Daniel is a French artist-researcher and university lecturer whose work, since the early 1990s, questions the relationships between painting, computing, communication devices, and image production.

This research led to a doctoral thesis “D’un atelier à l’autre au regard des faits,” defended at the Sorbonne in 1997. He is also the author, among others, of the article “L’atelier mimématique,” published in L’Aventure humaine, nos. 3-4, in 1995.

His artistic career began in the 1970s. He participated notably in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and the Salon Figuration Critique in Paris in 1977, 1978, and 1979. His work has since been shown in France and abroad, notably in Casablanca, Portsmouth, Gijón, Moscow, and Providence in the United States.

Among the main milestones of his career are:

- the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and the Salon Figuration Critique, Paris;
- the performance The Missive of the Third Day, Moscow, 1987;
- the solo exhibition The Gates of Earthly Paradise, Scène nationale du Moulin du Roc, Niort, 1989;
- the solo exhibition at the V. S. Canale gallery, Paris, 1990;
- the exhibition and performance Mimesis, Moscow;
- the Telematic Banquet, with the Art Networks group, as part of the exhibition Machines to Communicate, Cité des sciences et de l’industrie de La Villette, Paris, 1991-1992;
- the International Meetings Art/Cinema/Video/Computer, Paris Videotheque;
- the exhibition Soft which can, Futuroscope;
- the gallery 55Bellechasse, Paris, 2014;
- the gallery Atelier 213, Paris, 2019.

This artistic, theoretical and academic activity allows situating his current use of artificial intelligence within a historical research that began long before the emergence of contemporary image generators.

The approach

Max-Daniel’s work does not consist of mass-producing images generated by artificial intelligence. Each work is developed through successive steps: conception, generation, selection, digital composition, canvas printing, observation time, followed by manual oil, medium, or glazing interventions.

The image obtained with the computer tool is therefore not considered a definitive result, but an intermediate state. The work unfolds over time, through additions, overlays, and transformations, until a pictorial intervention profoundly changes its reading. It establishes a dialogue between ancient techniques and new ones.

The work

In Saint Francis and the Birds, Francis of Assisi is depicted in a peaceful exchange with a bird perched on his finger. The composition brings together the human figure, the animal, the landscape, the distant city, and a tree occupying the center of the space.

After printing the image onto canvas, the artist manually introduced a new event: a fire concealed in the grove, accompanied by white smoke that traverses the vegetation.

This intervention transforms a contemplative scene into a more open and ambiguous image. The fire may evoke the burning bush, a spiritual manifestation, contemporary fragility of nature, but also “Brother Fire,” celebrated by Francis of Assisi in the Canticle of the Creatures.

Two presences then respond to each other in the composition: on the left, the bird perched on the saint’s finger; on the right, the flame hidden in the foliage. Francis looks at the bird, but does not yet see the fire. The work is built in this gap between the conscious relationship and the event that appears outside of his gaze.

The white smoke belongs to the scene depicted while asserting the material surface of the canvas. It makes visible the transition between the image developed with DALL·E and the painter’s physical intervention.

Characteristics

Artist: Max-Daniel

Title: Saint Francis and the Birds

Year: 2026

Dimensions: 40 × 40 cm

Orientation: square

Technique: creation with DALL·E, digital composition, canvas printing, oil painting and medium

Category: mixed media / digital art and painting

Edition: unique work

Signature: signed “Max-Daniel 2026” on the front and back

Support: canvas mounted on stretcher

Framing: unframed

State: recent work, in very good condition
The work comes with a certificate of authenticity dated and signed by the artist (see reproduction) guaranteeing the uniqueness and originality of the work.