In ‘Bound by Steam and Silence’ by the British painter Von Wolfe, two elegant reclining figures dominate the composition. Often drawing on the artist’s profound knowledge of art history, Von Wolfe’s works powerfully reflect the sensibilities of the present moment. The nude, meeting our gaze, recalls the reclining Venus of Giorgione and Botticelli, yet here the tranquil wheat field is unsettled by the whistle and steam of the oncoming train—folding layers of time into the image. Rising and intent, each figure appears empowered, staging a dialogue with Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur L’herbe. Von Wolfe's works are developed in collaboration with artificial intelligence, but not as mere tools of image generation. Instead, Von Wolfe treats the AI as an errant interlocutor - producing a flood of visual propositions, outliers, and uncanny hybrids. From this visual delirium, the artist isolates moments of particular psychic intensity, reworking them by hand in oil with classical precision. What results is a new kind of mythic realism - one that emerges from the machine’s subconscious and the artist’s instinctual logic.