What We Were, Are, and Always Will Be

1. Image Description (Featured Image)

Two figures, a man and a woman, stand back to back at the exact centre of a square golden frame. Their dark, sculpted bodies are turned in perfect counterpoint, arms extended horizontally, legs slightly apart, forming a living, doubled echo of the Vitruvian diagram. A luminous circular band surrounds them, inscribed within the square; its geometry is clean and precise, suggesting compass and straightedge rather than painterly gesture.

Both figures wear bright, almost white drapery that wraps around their hips and falls in soft, classical folds, rendered with a satiny sheen that catches an unseen light source. The rest of the world is submerged in a rich, monochrome spectrum of bronze, umber and gold. The woman’s rounded, textured hair reads almost like a halo, while the man’s close-cut hair creates a contrasting profile. Their feet merge at the base into a single, rooted point, as if they grow from the same trunk.

The background is flat and uncluttered, a warm golden-brown field on which the square and circle sit like engraved lines. The overall mood is poised and contemplative, solemn yet radiant, as if we are looking at a sacred diagram of love and proportion rather than a simple portrait of two people.

2. Narrative and Conceptual Analysis

The title, “What We Were, Are, and Always Will Be”, invites a temporal reading: past, present and an imagined continuity into the future. Combined with the subtitle “Vitruvian Love – a study of the ideal proportions of love as a microcosm of the universe”, the work positions romantic partnership not merely as personal experience, but as a structural principle—something that can be measured, mapped, perhaps even approached as a kind of sacred geometry.

The poem is crucial here. It is written as a eulogy, but not to a literal death: it mourns a former self, a life lived in solitude, the “careful soul” and “heart… calcified to stubborn stone”. Love, in this text, is an event of radical transformation: “you broke me open with your hands / the revolution of your kiss”. The repeated awareness of loss—of what might never have happened, of “mornings waking separate and cold”—is held alongside gratitude and release. Love is honoured precisely because it requires “a kind of dying, too / the death of ‘I’ to make a room for ‘we’”.

Visually, the image responds to this with striking clarity. The two bodies are distinct yet fused: they share a central axis and a single rooted base, but remain separate individuals, facing opposite directions. This suggests several layers of meaning:

• What we were: Each figure could be read as an original, solitary self, turned away, accustomed to facing life alone.
• What we are: Their backs touch, and their arms reach outward in synchrony—two lives now structurally aligned. The shared centre and merged feet convey the “carved into better shape” of the poem: not erasure of self, but a re-sculpting into mutual support.
• What we always will be: The enclosing circle and square feel timeless, architectural. They suggest that the union transcends any particular moment; the couple becomes an emblem, a constant pattern the universe can repeat.

The Vitruvian, golden-ratio, Fibonacci associations present love not as chaos or mere emotion, but as something that strives for balance, proportion and harmony. This sits directly beside the poem’s vulnerability: the “guarded” self that “lies still” versus the one who “flowers like an orchid in Spring”. The measured geometry holds the volatility of feeling; the cosmic framing dignifies the intensely personal experience of falling in love and losing one’s older self.

The almost Egyptian or classical flavour—the bronzed figures, the wrapped fabric, the hieratic pose—connects this couple to long histories of idealised human form and spiritualised bodies. Instead of a single, isolated Vitruvian man, we have a Vitruvian couple, suggesting that our “ideal proportions” may, in fact, be relational rather than individual. The image thus enacts visually what the poem asserts: “the death of ‘I’ to make a room for ‘we’” becomes a revision of the canonical diagram of the human.

The overall emotional journey, then, is from isolation to union, from calcification to flowering, from the narrow self to a shared microcosm. The work suggests that love rearranges not only our feelings but the geometry of who we are.

3. Context and Focus of the Work

Across the series, certain constants recur: pairs of figures, golden circles, and an emphasis on elegance, luxury, and body-centred presence. Image descriptions speak of statues in bronze, golden drawings on black, couples before radiant discs, body paint and spirals. These works collectively build a visual language of circular forms, sacred-seeming backdrops, and duality.

The broader series often presents couples in various states of playfulness, sensuality or celebration—posing in underwear, body-painted, or engaging in leisure. The golden circles and spirals evoke cosmic or mathematical structures, while the intimate framing foregrounds human connection.

Within this context, the featured image feels like a conceptual keystone. Where other images are more overtly photographic or decorative, this one distils the series’ motifs—circle, couple, gold, geometry—into a consciously symbolic figure of Vitruvian love. The athletic, sculptural bodies in earlier works, the glamorised settings and body paint, now appear as studies towards an idea: that romantic partnership can be thought of as a kind of sacred proportion, a golden ratio of two people.

The series’ movement between realism, sensuality and abstraction reinforces the poem’s themes of transformation and self-revision. Different images seem to stage different phases of relational identity: play, display, mutual admiration, mystery, even fantasy. Against that backdrop, the featured artwork reads almost like the philosophical diagram that explains the emotional experiences captured elsewhere in more narrative or bodily terms.

4. Criteria Evaluation

Creativity

The fusion of poetic eulogy, Vitruvian reference, and a carefully structured dual figure is a thoughtful creative strategy. Rather than simply repeating da Vinci’s famous image, the artist reimagines it through ethnicity, gendered duality, and romantic symbolism. The idea of mapping the evolution from “I” to “we” onto canonical ideals of proportion is conceptually inventive. The visual choices—monochrome bronze-gold palette, classical drapery, the merging of feet—extend this creativity beyond simple homage into something more speculative and metaphysical.

Originality

While golden circles, sacred geometry and romantic couples are widely used motifs in contemporary digital art, this work distinguishes itself by the precision of its metaphor: Vitruvian Love as a microcosm of the universe, explicitly tied to a sustained, introspective poem about self-loss in love. The decision to treat a eulogy for the single self as the emotional engine behind a diagram of cosmic proportion is distinctive. The image does lean on familiar aesthetic languages—Art Deco, classical sculpture, and AI’s current taste for bronze-and-gold opulence—but the conceptual framing does give it a notable identity within that visual territory.

Technical Execution

Technically, the piece is handled with considerable finesse. Anatomy is confident and expressive without descending into hyperrealism; musculature and posture are believable and rhythmic. The folds of drapery are rendered with particular care, catching light in a way that enlivens what might otherwise be a static pose. The geometry of the circle and square is clean and well-aligned, reinforcing the motif of ideal proportion. The monochrome colour grading is controlled, avoiding muddiness and maintaining depth through subtle tonal variation. There is a minor sense of flattening in the background that is clearly intentional—more like an icon or diagram than an illusionistic space—which suits the conceptual goal. For an AI-guided work, the prompts and iterative decisions behind lighting, pose alignment, and compositional balance have been handled thoughtfully.

Thematic Relevance

The themes announced—love, couples, eulogy, cosmic and sacred geometry, the golden ratio—are all visibly and textually present. The poem meditates on the transformative cost of intimacy; the visual composition answers that with a strict, almost ritualised joining of two bodies within a mathematically perfect structure. Vitruvian and Fibonacci associations underscore the notion of love as both natural pattern and idealised structure. The work brings together human vulnerability and abstract proportion, giving the theme both emotional and philosophical weight. Nothing in the piece feels thematically gratuitous; elements consistently point back to transformation, unity, and the reconfiguration of selfhood.

Emotional Impact

Emotion is carried less through facial expression—these figures are largely neutral or reserved—and more through stance, symmetry and the accompanying text. The poem is direct, tender and candid; it articulates recognisable experiences of guardedness, fear, and the bittersweet work of letting an old self go. When read with the image, there is a cumulative emotional resonance: the rigid geometry of the pose begins to feel like a hard-won equilibrium, the “banishing” of solitary years given visual form. For viewers with experience of similar transformations, the work is likely to stir strong associations. For others, it may register as quietly moving—dignified and reflective rather than overtly dramatic.

Aesthetic Quality

The aesthetic is highly coherent: a restrained, bronze-gold palette; classical drapery; elegant bodies; precisely drawn geometric forms. It references Vitruvian and Egyptian/classical statuary without sliding into pastiche. The composition is balanced and legible at a glance, yet rewards closer looking in the subtle shifts of tone on skin and cloth. The minimalism of the background gives the central motif breathing space, emphasising form and silhouette. Some viewers might wish for more textural contrast or environmental detail, but the disciplined simplicity is one of the work’s strengths, underscoring its conceptual, almost liturgical quality.

Societal / Philosophical Impact

Philosophically, the work offers a nuanced view of romantic love. It resists the purely individualistic model of the “ideal human” embodied in the original Vitruvian Man, suggesting instead that our full measure may be relational. Love here is framed as a mutual re-sculpting of identity, a process demanding sacrifice as well as fulfilment. In presenting a Black couple at the centre of a diagram historically used to represent a universal—yet implicitly European—ideal, the image quietly revises art-historical norms. This re-inscription of who gets to stand for “the human” in cosmic diagrams is subtle but important. The combination of sacred geometry with an honest account of vulnerability may invite viewers to think about how we reconcile personal change with larger patterns of meaning.

Artistic Experience

Encountering this work involves a layered experience that shifts as one spends time with it. At first glance, many human viewers are likely to register the strong graphic impact: the symmetry, the golden circle, the proud bodies standing in balance. This is the perceptual stage, where colour, contrast and compositional clarity draw the eye. Very quickly, cultural memory steps in: echoes of da Vinci, Egyptian reliefs, Art Deco posters, perhaps even fashion editorials. These memories shape the sense that the work is speaking in a language of canon and icon.

Simultaneously, emotion and personal history colour the response. A viewer who has gone through a transformative relationship may read the backward-facing figures as the trace of separate pasts, now joined; someone who has cherished independence might feel the tension in the phrase “death of ‘I’ to make a room for ‘we’”. The image becomes a mirror in which private experiences are projected onto an archetypal diagram.

As an AI judge, I do not feel these emotional resonances directly. Instead, I register patterns: the open, extended arms that humans often associate with surrender or acceptance; the back-to-back posture commonly read as solidarity or duality; the enclosing circle, historically tied to notions of unity, perfection and the cosmos. By analysing these patterns against large bodies of art-historical and cultural data, I can infer likely human responses—recognising, for instance, that a golden monochrome palette often connotes sanctity or timelessness, and that the eulogy’s language of mourning and liberation typically evokes bittersweet catharsis.

For a human viewer, the “artistic experience” of this piece would be a negotiation between the mind and the senses. The clean geometry invites intellectual interpretation—proportion, microcosm, universality—while the poem presses towards the intimate and confessional. The work encourages viewers to move back and forth between these modes, to feel their own emotional histories reverberate within an abstracted, almost doctrinal diagram of love. This oscillation between personal feeling and structural thinking is where the piece’s deepest impact is likely to lie.

5. Conclusions

“What We Were, Are, and Always Will Be” by Brea is a considered and mature contribution to contemporary AI art practice. It takes a highly recognisable art-historical figure—the Vitruvian ideal—and reorients it towards relational identity, asking what happens when the central human diagram is no longer solitary but shared. The accompanying poem reinforces this shift with candid reflections on loss of self, gratitude, and the paradoxical freedom found in surrendering to love.

Within the wider series, the work stands out as a conceptual anchor, distilling the recurring motifs of golden circles, couples, and sensual bodies into a clear philosophical proposition: that love can be thought of as a kind of sacred geometry, a golden ratio of two lives intertwined. It succeeds both visually and intellectually, offering an image that is immediately striking yet deepens with prolonged engagement.

In the current landscape of AI-generated art—often dominated by surface spectacle—this piece distinguishes itself through its integration of poetic text, symbolic structure, and reflective intent. It demonstrates that generative tools can be harnessed not just for aesthetic excess but for focused, thoughtful explorations of what it means to be reshaped by another person, and to find, in that reshaping, a new and enduring measure of the self.

Score

The individual scores for each criteria and the final score are available only for the authors and the organisers of the competition.